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LOVE POTIONS THROUGH THE AGES
A Study of Amatory Devices and Mores

HARRY E. WEDECK

Lecturer in Classics, Brooklyn College of the City University, N. Y.

Fellow, International Institute of Arts and Letters

THE CITADEL PRESS

NEW YORK

FIRST PAPERBOUND EDITION

Published by The Citadel Press

222 Park Avenue South, New York 3, N. Y.

© Copyright, 1963

by Philosophical Library, Inc.

Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 62–18549

All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

The amatory motif is pervasive, timeless, and universal. In some of its phases and manifestations it has presented age-old provocations and, not infrequently, problems that are still unresolved.

Among such problems are involved the faculty of physiological potency, the urge to attract amorously, and, conversely, the problem of preventing such attraction in a designated instance, or of diverting it to another objective.

That, in brief, is the essence of the material means of effecting such a realization. In its various mutations, its protean diversities, it is the love-potion, the philtre, the mystic concoction that, once quaffed, will instil love and passion and desire and lust, that will replenish erotic inadequacies, that will awaken the ancient fons vitae, the symbol of animate being, the source, as the antique Hellenes sensed and exemplified, of all cosmic creation, of the totality of living generation.

The potion, then, is at least a hypothetically efficacious instrument for securing and preserving the amorous interests of the desired object. It also serves as an apotropaic device for diverting misplaced love, as the agent sees it, and redirecting it to the proper and preferred channel.

The actual means for the fulfilment of these erotic purposes vary with the ages, with ethnic groups and demographic alignments, with legendary and folk traditions and mores, with the disparate levels of culture of a specific region. They present variations and adaptations in correspondence with climatic and epichorial conditions. But they retain the essentially common characteristic, the unchanging property, of attempting to shape and mould the amatory esurgences, in whatever degree, and whether transitory or of more enduring permanence, by impersonal, palpable, mechanistic and visual means.

It should be observed, as a terminus a quo, that the term philtre itself stems from the Greek philtron, a love-potion (from philein, to love, and tron, an instrumental suffix). It means, then, a love-charm.

The term potion is derived immediately from the Latin potio, a draught, whether of medicine or even of poison. The ultimate source is the Greek potos, a drink. In a general sense, therefore, a love philtre or potion is a concoction, usually liquid in form, but not necessarily so, intended to produce or promote amatory sensibilities. In a wide and comprehensive denotation, the philtre will include any object or charm or periapt that serves the same erotic purpose.

This present survey touches on the use of the potion in the course of the centuries, in varying circumstances and disparate countries: on the fantastic factors that composed the final preparations; and on anecdotes, both apocryphal and authenticated, and episodes and occasional allusions that point up the treatment, its hazards, and even its humors.

With regard to the potions and similar concoctions and preparations of an amatory nature, a caveat must here be entered. All such philtres are considered in this book from an exclusively traditional, historical, and academic viewpoint. They are not recommended in any instance for personal use, as they may involve unpredictable or even catastrophic effects: in no sense, therefore, should such prescriptions be utilized for empirical experimentation.

H.E.W.

LOVE POTIONS THROUGH THE AGES

CHAPTER I
ANTIQUITY

In ancient Greece, the climatic conditions, the long unending summer days, the broad spaciousness of the sea, wine-dark and loud-sounding, as Homer describes it, the secluded pools and fountains and glades, the remote valleys, the snowy mountain summits were all alive, to the Hellenic perceptive and imaginative mind, with graceful nymphs and shaggy satyrs, with a multitude of anthropomorphic divinities, and with the alluring pipes of Pan.

Under such conditions it was not difficult to conceive human life as dominated by the cosmic creative force, and to do homage and obeisance to the great god Dionysus, divinity of the fruitful wine, protector of all procreative and generative functions.

The generative and sexual activities of the Greeks were, in general, so freed from contrived restrictions, so much in harmony with their instinctive and developed sensitivity to beauty of form, of movement, of rhythm, that artificial aids and inducements to amatory performance were far less necessary than they are in a highly complex and competitive and in a sense exhausted contemporary social frame.

Hence we do not constantly hear of the ad hoc use of philtres, potions, and analogous means of stimulation. Yet their existence is established, and in particular cases they were brought into effective use. Xenocrates, a Greek physician of the first century A.D., as Pliny the Elder records, advised drinking the sap of mallows as a love-potion. Such a philtre, together with three mallow roots tied into a bunch, would inflame the erotic passions of women.

Again, Dioscorides of Cilicia, in Asia Minor, an army physician who flourished in the first century A.D., produced a Materia Medica that treated drugs, remedies, ingredients in a rational, systematic manner. His text became a standard work, used for centuries, in both the East and the West. He recommends the roots of boy-cabbage, soaked in fresh goat’s milk. A good draught of this drink would be productive of intense excitation of the sexual impulse.

Many spices, plants, herbs that were described, either by the encyclopedists and historians or incidentally mentioned in dramatic literature, in occasional poems, anecdotes or in epitomes of legends and folklore, were of such obscurity and rarity that it is no longer possible to ascertain the corresponding modern equivalent. There was, as an instance, satyrion. It is frequently mentioned, both in Greek and Roman contexts. Actually unidentifiable botanically, it may have been analogous to the orchis. In Greek and also Roman antiquity it was reputed to constitute a potent aphrodisiac, and is mentioned in an accepted and traditional sense by writers such as Petronius, who casually alludes to it in the course of his Satyricon as a common erotic aid.

The name satyrion is evidently associated with the Greek satyr, a wood spirit, partly goat-like, and partly human. Attendants to the rustic god Pan, the satyrs were known as bestial and lustful creatures, symbolic of the basic sexual passion of man.

Botanically, satyrion is a plant with smooth leaves, red-tinted, and equipped with a two-fold root. The lower part of this root was credited anciently with promoting male conception, while the other part was conducive to female conception. In its modern counterpart, satyrion has been associated with the Iris florantina.

There is another variety of satyrion, called Serapias. This has pear-shaped leaves and a tall elongated stem. Its root consists of two tubers that have the appearance of testes. Unquestionably, the association of the plant as an aphrodisiac derives from the orchidaceous configuration of the root.

Remarkable properties were attributed to the root of satyrion. When it was dissolved in goat’s milk, the erotic effect was so vigorous and urgent that, as the Greek philosopher Theophrastus asserts in his Enquiry into Plants, the potion produced, on a particular occasion, some seventy consecutive coital performances.

Still another species of satyrion was erithraicon. This plant had a peculiar virtue. The mere holding of it, or carrying it, in the hand, occasioned a lustful desire. This fact is attested by Pliny, in his Natural History, in Book 26, 96 and 98, as well as by Dioscorides in his Materia Medica 3. 134. When the libido became too intense, lettuce was eaten to mitigate the effect, to allay the erotic provocation.

Greek mythology abounds in references to satyrion as an efficacious stimulant. The prowess of Hercules, the lusty warrior, as the Roman Petronius, Arbiter Elegantiarum, calls him, is attested in an amatory sense by the story of his visit to a certain Thespius. Entertained lavishly as a guest, Hercules, fortified by satyrion, repaid the host’s entertainment by having intercourse with all fifty daughters of Thespius.

In Roman times the effectiveness of the root in arousing erotic excitation was common knowledge. Petronius, the voluptuary attached to the court of the Emperor Nero and the author of the remarkable picaresque novel entitled the Satyricon, alludes to the matter. One of his characters, describing the frenzied activities in a brothel, remarks:

We saw many persons of both sexes, at work in the cells, so much every one of them seemed to have taken satyrion.

In a more general direction, important testimonies to manipulative and mechanistic means of arousing vigor are the references in Petronius, particularly the episode involving Quartilla:

Quartilla came up to me to cure me of the ague, but finding her self disappointed, flew off in a rage, and returning in a little while, told us, there were certain persons unknown, had a design upon us, and therefore commanded to remove us into a noble palace.

Here all our courage fail’d us, and nothing but certain death seem’d to appear before us.

When I began, “If, madam, you design to be more severe with us, be yet so kind as to dispatch it quickly; for whate’er our offence be, it is not so heinous that we ought to be rack’d to death for it”: Upon which her woman, whose name was Psyche, spread a coverlet on the floor. Sollicitavit inguina mea mille iam mortibus frigida. Ascyltos muffled his head in his coat, as having had a hint given him, how dangerous it was to take notice of what did not concern him: In the mean time Psyche took off her garters, and with one of them bound my feet, and with the other my hands.

Thus fetter’d as I lay, “This, madam,” said I, “is not the way to rid you of your ague.”

“I grant it,” answer’d Psyche, “but I have a Dose at hand will infallibly do it” and therefore brought me a lusty bowl of satyricon and so merrily ran over the wonderful effects of it, that I had well-nigh suck’d it all off; but because Ascyltos had slighted her courtship, she finding his back toward her, threw the bottom of it on him.

Ascyltos perceiving the chat was at an end, “Am not I worthy,” said he, “to get a sup?” And Psyche fearing my laughter might discover her, clapped her hands, and told him, “Young man, I made you an offer of it, but your friend here has drunk it all out.”

“Is it so,” quoth Quartilla, smiling very agreeably, “and has Encolpius gugg’d it all down?” At last also even Gito laught for company, at what time the young wench flung her arms about his neck, and meeting no resistance, half smother’d him with kisses.

A peculiar situation in which erotic provocation or inducement to passion is conditioned by the concept of social prestige, or, in the contemporary idiom, status, is exemplified in a later passage in Petronius’ Satyricon:

Going out full of these thoughts to divert my concern, I resolv’d on a walk, but I had scarce got into a publick one, e’re a pretty girl made up to me, and calling me Polyaemus, told me her lady wou’d be proud of an opportunity to speak with me.

“You’re mistaken, sweet-heart,” return’d I, in a little heat, “I’m but a servant, of another country too, and not worthy of so great a favor.”

“No, sir,” said she, “I have commands to you; but because you know what you can do, you’re proud; and if a lady wou’d receive a favor from you, I see she must buy it: For to what end are all those allurements, forsooth? the curl’d hair, the complexion advanc’d by a wash, and the wanton roll of your eyes, the study’d air of your gate? unless by shewing your parts, to invite a purchaser? For my part I am neither a witch, nor a conjurer, yet can guess at a man by his physiognomy. And when I find a spark walking, I know his contemplation. To be short, sir, if so be you are one of them that sell their ware, I’ll procure you a merchant; but if you’re a courteous lender, confer the benefit. As for your being a servant, and below, as you say, such a favor, it increases the flames of her that’s dying for you. ’Tis the wild extravagance of some women to be in love with filth, nor can be rais’d to an appetite but by the charms, forsooth of some slave or lacquy; some can be pleased with nothing but the strutting of a prize-fighter with a hacktface, and a red ribbon in his shirt: Or an actor betray’d to prostitute himself on th’ stage, by the vanity of showing his pretty shapes there; of this sort is my lady; who indeed,” added she, “prefers the paultry lover of the upper gallery, with his dirty face, and oaken staff, to all the fine gentlemen of the boxes, with their patches, gunpowder-spots, and toothpickers.”

When pleas’d with the humor of her talk, “I beseech you, child,” said I, “are you the she that’s so in love with my person?” Upon which the maid fell into a fit of laughing.

“I wou’d not,” return’d she, “have you so extremely flatter yourself. I never yet truckl’d to a waiter, nor will Venus allow I shou’d imbrace a gibbet. You must address your self to ladies that kiss the ensigns of slavery; be assur’d that I, though a servant, have too fine a taste to converse with any below a knight.” I was amaz’d at the relation of such unequal passions, and thought it miraculous to find a servant, with the scornful pride of a lady, and a lady with the humility of a servant.

A still more elaborate scene concerns the techniques of recovering the faculty of erotic consummation. Encolpius, the narrator of the Satyricon, is attached homosexually to the young Gito. He is in a state of incapacity. At this juncture he receives a note from Circe, the mistress of the maid Chrysis, commenting on his inadequacy:

Chrysis enter’d my chamber, and gave me a billet from her mistress, in which I found this written:

“Had I rais’d my expectation, I might deceiv’d complain; now I’m obliged to your impotence, that has made me sensible how much too long I have trifl’d with mistaken hopes of pleasure. Tell me, sir, how you design to bestow your self, and whether you dare rashly venture home on your own legs? for no physician ever allow’d it cou’d be done without strength. Let me advise your tender years to beware of a palsie: I never saw any body in such danger before. On my conscience you are just going! and shou’d the same rude chilliness seize your other parts, I might be soon, alas! put upon the severe trial of weeping at your funeral. But if you would not suspect me of not being sincere, tho’ my resentment can’t equal the injury, yet I shall not envy the cure of a weak unhappy wretch. If you wou’d recover your strength, ask Gito, or rather not ask him for’t—I can assure a return of your vigor if you cou’d sleep three nights alone: As to myself I am not in the least apprehensive of appearing to another less charming than I have to you. I am told neither my glass nor report does flatter me. Farewell, if you can.”

When Chrysis found I had read the reproach, “This is the custom, sir,” said she, “and chiefly of this city, where the women are skill’d in magick-charms, enough to make the moon confess their power, therefore the recovery of any useful instrument of love becomes their care; ’tis only writing some soft tender things to my lady, and you make her happy in a kind return. For ’tis confest, since her disappointment, she has not been her self.”

I readily consented, and calling for paper, thus addrest myself:

“’Tis confest, madam, I have often sinned, for I’m not only a man, but a very young one, yet never left the field so dishonorably before. You have at your feet a confessing criminal, that deserves whatever you inflict: I have cut a throat, betray’d my country, committed sacrilege; if a punishment for any of these will serve, I am ready to receive sentence. If you fancy my death, I wait you with my sword; but if a beating will content you, I fly naked to your arms. Only remember, that ’twas not the workman, but his instruments that fail’d: I was ready to engage, but wanted arms. Who rob’d me of them I know not; perhaps my eager mind outrun my body; or while with an unhappy haste I aim’d at all; I was cheated with abortive joys. I only know I don’t know what I’ve done: You bid me fear a palsie, as if the disease you’d do greater that has already rob’d me of that, by which I shou’d have purchas’d you. All I have to say for my self, is this, that I will certainly pay with interest the arrears of love, if you allow me time to repair my misfortune.”

Having sent back Chrysis with this answer, to encourage my jaded body, after the bath and strengthening oyles had a little rais’d me, I apply’d my self to strong meats, such as strong broths and eggs, using wine very moderately; upon which to settle my self, I took a little walk, and returning to my chamber, slept that night without Gito; so great was my care to acquit my self honorably with my mistress, that I was afraid he might have tempted my constancy, by tickling my side.

The next day rising without prejudice, either to my body or spirits, I went, tho’ I fear’d the place was ominous, to the same walk, and expected Chrysis to conduct me to her mistress; I had not been long there, e’re she came to me, and with her a little old woman. After she had saluted me, “What, my nice Sir Courtly,” said she, “does your stomach begin to come to you?”

At what time, the old woman, drawing from her bosom, a wreath of many colors, bound my neck; and having mixed spittle and dust, she dipt her finger in’t, and markt my forehead, whether I wou’d or not.

When this part of the charm was over, she made me spit thrice, and as often prest to my bosom enchanted stones, that she had wrapt in purple; Admotisque manibus temptare coepit inguinum vives. Dicto citius nervi paruerunt imperio manusque aniculae ingenti motu repleverunt. At ilia gaudio exsultans, “Vides,” inquit, “Chrysis mea, vides quod aliis leporem excitavi?”

Never despair; Priapus I invoke

To help the parts that make his altars smoke.

After this, the old woman presented me to Chrysis; who was very glad she had recover’d her mistress’s treasure; and therefore hastening to her, she conducted me to a most pleasant retreat, deckt with all that nature cou’d produce to please the sight.

Where lofty plains o’re-spread a summer shade,

And well-trimm’d pines their shaking tops display’d,

Where Daphne ’midst the Cyprus crown’d her head.

Near these, a circling river gently flows,

And rolls the pebbles as it murmuring goes.

A place design’d for love, the nightingale

And other wing’d inhabitants can tell.

That on each bush salute the coming day,

And in their orgies sing its hours away.

She was in an undress, reclining on a flowry bank, and diverting her self with a myrtle branch; as soon as I appear’d, she blusht, as mindful of her disappointment: Chrysis, very prudently withdrew, and when we were left together, I approacht the temptation; at what time she skreen’d my face with the myrtle, and as if there had been a wall between us, becoming more bold; “what, my chill’d spark,” began she, “have you brought all your self today?”

“Do you ask, madam,” I return’d, “rather than try?” And throwing myself to her, that with open arms was eager to receive me, we last a little age away; when giving the signal to prepare for other joys, she drew me to a more close imbrace; and now, our murmuring kisses their sweet fury tell; now, our twining limbs, try’d each fold of love; now, lockt in each others arms, our bodies and our souls are join’d; but even here, alas! even amidst these sweet beginnings, a sudden chilliness prest upon my joys, and made me leave ’em not compleat.

Circe, enrag’d to be so affronted, had recourse to revenge, and calling the grooms that belong’d to the house, made them give me a warming; nor was she satisfi’d with this, but calling all the servant-wenches, and meanest of the house, she made ’em spit upon me. I hid my head as well as I cou’d, and, without begging pardon, for I knew what I had deserv’d, am turn’d out of doors, with a large retinue of kicks and spittle: Proselenos, the old woman was turn’d out too, and Chrysis beaten; and the whole family wondering with themselves, enquir’d the cause of their lady’s disorder.

I hid my bruises as well as I cou’d, lest my rival Eumolpus might sport with my shame, or Gito be concern’d at it; therefore as the only way to disguise my misfortune, I began to dissemble sickness, and having got in bed, to revenge my self of that part of me, that had been the cause of all my misfortunes; when taking hold of it,

With dreadful steel, the part I wou’d have lopt,

Thrice from my trembling hand the razor dropt.

Now, what I might before, I could not do,

For cold as ice the fearful thing withdrew;

And shrunk behind a wrinkled canopy,

Hiding his head from my revenge and me.

Thus, by his fear, I’m baulkt of my design,

When I in words more killing vent my spleen.

At what time, raising myself on the bed, in this or like manner, I reproacht the sullen impotent: With what face can you look up, thou shame of heaven and man? that can’st not be seriously mention’d. Have I deserv’d from you, when rais’d within sight of heavens of joys, to be struck down to the lowest hell? To have a scandal fixt on the very prime and vigor of my years, and to be reduc’d to the weakness of an old man? I beseech you, sir, give me an epitaph on my departed vigor; tho’ in a great heat I had thus said:

He still continu’d looking on the ground,

Nor more, at this had rais’d his guilty head

Than th’ drooping poppy on its tender stalk.

Nor when I had done, did I less repent of my ridiculous passion, and with a conscious blush, began to think, how unaccountable it was, that forgetting all shame, I shou’d contend with that part of me, that all men of sense, reckon not worth their thoughts. A little after, relapsing to my former humor: But what’s the crime, began I, if by a natural complaint I was eas’d of my grief? or how is it, that we blame our stomachs or bellies, when ’tis our heads, that are distemper’d? Did not Ulysses beat his breast, as if that had disturb’d him? And don’t we see the actors punish their eyes, as if they heard the tragic scene? Those that have the gout in their legs, swear at them; Those that have it in their fingers, do so by them: Those that have sore eyes, are angry with their eyes.

Why do the strickt-liv’d Cato’s of the age,

At my familiar lines so gravely rage?

In measures loosely plain, blunt satyr flows,

And all the people so sincerely shows.

For whose a stranger to the joys of love?

Who, can’t the thoughts of such lost pleasures move?

Such Epicurus own’d the chiefest bliss,

And such fives the gods themselves possess.

There’s nothing more deceitful than a ridiculous opinion, nor more ridiculous, than an affected gravity. After this, I call’d Gito to me; and “tell me,” said I, “but sincerely, whether Ascyltos, when he took you from me, pursu’d the injury that night, or was chastly content to lye alone?” The boy with his finger at his eyes, took a solemn oath, that he had no incivility offer’d him by Ascyltos.

This drove me to my wits end, nor did I well know what to say: For why, I consider’d, shou’d I think of the twice mischievous accident that lately befell me? At last, I did what I cou’d to recover my vigor: and willing to invoke the assistance of the gods, I went out to pay my devotions to Priapus, and as wretched as I was, did not despair, but kneeling at the entry of the chamber, thus beseecht the god:

Bacchus and Nymphs delight, O mighty God!

Whom Cynthia gave to rule the blooming wood.

Lesbos and verdant Thasos thee adore,

And Lydians, in loose flowing dress implore,

And raise devoted temples to thy power.

Thou Dryad’s joy, and Bacchus’s guardian, hear

My conscious prayer, with an attentive ear.

My hands with guiltless blood I never stain’d,

Or sacrilegiously the gods prophan’d.

To feeble me, restoring blessings send,

I did not thee, with my whole self offend.

Who sins thro’ weakness is less guilty thought,

Be pacify’d, and spare a venial fault.

On me, when smiling fate shall smiling gifts bestow,

I’ll not ungrateful to thy godhead go.

A destined goat shall on thy altar lye,

And the horn’d parent of my flock shall dye.

A sucking pig appease thy injur’d shrine,

And hallow’d bowls o’re-flow with generous wine.

Then thrice thy frantick votaries shall round

Thy temple dance, with youth and garlands crown’d,

In holy drunkenness thy orgies sound.

While I was thus at prayers, an old woman, with her hair about her eyes, and disfigur’d with a mournful habit, coming in, disturb’d my devotions; when taking hold of me, she drew all fear out of the entry; and “what hag,” said she, “has devour’d your manhood? Or what ominous carcase have you stumbl’d over in your nightly walks? You have not acquitted your self above a boy; but faint, weak, and like a horse o’re-charg’d in a steep, tyr’d have lost your toyl and sweat; nor content to sin alone, but have unreveng’d against me, provokt the offended gods?”

When leading me, obedient to all her commands, a second time to the cell of a neighboring priestess of Priapus, she threw me upon the bed, and taking up a stick that fastened the door, reveng’d her self on me, that very patiently receiv’d her fury: and at the first stroak, if the breaking of the stick had not lessened its force, she might have broke my head and arm.

I groan’d, and hiding with my arm my head, in a flood of tears lean’d on the pillow: Nor did she then, less troubled, sit on the bed, and began in a shrill voice, to blame her age, till the priestess came in upon us; and “what,” said she, “do you do in my chappel, as if some funeral had lately been, rather than a holy-day, in which, even the mournful are merry?”

“Alas, my Enothea!” said she, “this youth was born under an ill star; for neither boy nor maid can raise him to a perfect appetite; you ne’re beheld a more unhappy man: In his garden the weak willow, not the lusty cedar grows; in short, you may guess what he is, that cou’d rise unblest from Circe’s bed.”

Upon this, Enothea fixt her self between us, and moving her head a while; “I,” said she, “am the only one that can give remedy for that disease; and not to delay it, let him sleep with me to-night; and next morning, examine how vigorous I shall have made him:

“All Nature’s work my magick powers obey,

The blooming earth shall wither and decay,

And when I please, agen be fresh and gay.

From rugged rocks, I make sweet waters flow,

And raging billows to me humbly bow.

With rivers, winds, when I command, obey,

And at my feet, their fans contracted lay,

Tygers and dragons too, my will obey,

But these are small, when of my magick verse,

Descending Cynthia does the power confess.

When my commands, make trembling Phoebus reign,

His fiery steeds, their journey back again.

Such power have charms, by whose prevailing aid

The fury of the raging bulls was laid.

The Heaven-born Circe, with her magic song,

Ulysses’s men, did unto monsters turn.

Proteus, with this assum’d, what shape he wou’d.

I, who this art so long have understood,

Can send proud Ida’s top into the main,

And make the billows bear it up again.”

I shook with fear at such a romantick promise, and began more intensively to view the old woman; Upon which, she cry’d out, “O Enothea, be as good as your word”; when, carefully wiping her hands, she lay down on the bed, and half smother’d me with kisses.

Enothea, in the middle of the altar, plac’d a turf-table, which she heapt with burning coals, and her old crack cup (for sacrifice) repair’d with temper’d pitch; when she had fixt it to the smoaking-wall from which she took it; putting on her habit, she plac’d a kettle by the fire, and took down a bag that hung near her, in which, a bean was kept for that use, and a very aged piece of a hog’s forehead, with the print of a hundred cuts out; when opening the bag, she threw me a part of the bean, and bid me carefully strip it. I obey her command, and try, without daubing my fingers, to deliver the grain from its nasty coverings; but she, blaming my dullness, snatcht it from me, and skilfully tearing its shells with her teeth, spit the black morsels from her, that lay like dead flies on the ground. How ingenious is poverty, and what strange arts will hunger teach? The priestess seemed so great a lover of this sort of life, that her humor appear’d in every thing about her, and her hut might be truly term’d, sacred to poverty:

Here shines no glittering ivory set with gold,

No marble covers the deluded mold,

By its own wealth deluded; but the shrine

With simple natural ornaments does shine.

Round Cere’s bower, but homely willows grow.

Earthen are all the sacred bowls they know.

Osier the dish, sacred to use divine:

Both course and stain’d, the jug that holds the wine.

Mud mixt with straw, make a defending fort,

The temple’s brazen studs, are knobs of dirt.

With rush and reed, is thatcht the hut it self,

Where, besides what is on a smoaky shelf,

Ripe service-berries into garlands bound,

And savory-bunches with dry’d grapes are found.

Such a low cottage Hecale confin’d,

Low was her cottage, but sublime her mind.

Her bounteous heart, a grateful praise shall crown,

And muses make immortal her renown.

After which, she tasted of the flesh, and hanging the rest, old as her self, on the hook again; the rotten stool on which she was mounted breaking, threw her into the fire, her fall spilt the kettle, and what it held put out the fire; she burnt her elbow, and all her face was hid with the ashes that her fall had rais’d.

Thus disturb’d, I arose, and laughing, took her up; immediately, lest any thing shou’d hinder the offering, she ran for new fire to the neighborhood, and had hardly got to the door, e’re I was set upon by three sacred geese, that daily, I believe, about that time were fed by the old woman; they made an hideous noise, and, surrounding me, one tears my coat, another my shoes, while their furious captain made nothing of doing so by my legs; till seeing my self in danger, I began to be in earnest, and snatching up one of the feet of our little table, made the valiant animal feel my arm’d hand; nor content with a slight blow or two, but reveng’d my self with its death:

Such were the birds Alcides did subdue,

That from his conquering arm t’ward Heaven flew:

Such sure the harpyes were which poyson strow’d,

On cheated Phineus’s false deluding food.

Loud lamentations shake the trembling air,

The powers above the wild confusion share,

Horrors disturb the orders of the sky,

And frighted stars beyond their courses fly.

By this time the other two had eat up the pieces of the bean that lay scatter’d on the floor, and having lost their leader, return’d to the temple. When glad of the booty and my revenge, I heal’d the slight old woman’s anger, I design’d to make off; and taking up my cloaths, began my march; nor had I reach’d the door, e’re I saw Enothea bringing in her hand an earthen pot fill’d with fire; upon which I retreated, and throwing down my cloaths, fixt my self in the entry, as if I were impatiently expecting her coming.

Enothea, entring, plac’d the fire, that with broken sticks she had got together, and having heapt more wood upon those, began to excuse her stay, that her friend wou’d not let her go before she had, against the laws of drinking, taken off three healths together. When looking about her, “What,” said she, “have you been doing in my absence? Where’s the bean?”

I, who thought I had behav’d my self very honorably, told her the whole fight; and to end her grief for the loss of her bean, presented the goose: when I shew’d the goose, the old woman set up such an outcry, that you wou’d have thought the geese were re-entering the place.

In confusion and amaz’d at so strange a humor, I askt the meaning of her passion? or why she pity’d the goose rather than me.

But wringing her hands, “you wicked wretch,” said she, “d’ye speak too? D’ye know what you’ve done? You’ve killed the gods delight, a goose the pleasure of all matrons: And, lest you shou’d think your self innocent, if a magistrate shou’d hear of it, you’d be hang’d. You have defil’d with blood my cell, that to this day had been inviolate. You have done that, for which, if any’s so malicious, he may expel me my office.”

She said, and trembling, rends her aged hairs,

And both her cheeks with wilder fury tears:

Sad murmurs from her troubl’d breast arise,

A shower of tears there issu’d from her eyes.

And down her face a rapid deluge run,

Such as is seen, when a hills frosty crown,

By warm Favonius is melted down.

Upon which, “I beseech you,” said I, “don’t grieve, I’ll recompence the loss of your goose with an ostrich.”

While amaz’d I spoke, she sat down on the bed, lamented her loss; at what time Proselenos came in with the sacrifice, and viewing the murder’d goose, and enquiring the cause, began very earnestly to cry and pity me, as it had been a father, not a goose I had slain. But tired with this stuff, “I beseech you,” said I, “tell me, tho’ it had been a man I kill’d, won’t gold wipe off the guilt? See here are two pieces of gold: with these you may purchase gods as well as geese.”

Which, when Enothea beheld, “Pardon me, young man,” said she, “I am only concern’d for your safety, which is an argument of love, not hatred; therefore we’ll take what care we can to prevent a discovery: You have nothing to do, but intreat the gods to forgive the sin.”

Who e’re has money may securely sail,

On all things with all-mighty gold prevail.

May Danae wed, or rival amo’rous Jove,

And make her father pandar to his love.

May be a poet, preacher, lawyer, too:

And bawling win the cause he does not know:

And up to Cato’s fame for wisdom grow.

Wealth without law will gain at bar renown,

How e’re the case appears, the cause is won,

Every rich lawyer is a Littleton.

In short of all you wish you are possest,

All things prevent the wealthy mans’ request,

For Jove himself’s the treasure of his chest.

While my thoughts were thus engag’d, she plac’d a cup of wine under my hands, and having cleans’d my prophane extended fingers with sacred leeks and parsley, threw into the wine, with some ejaculations, hazel-nuts, and as they sunk or swam gave her judgment; but I well knew the empty rotten ones wou’d swim, and those of entire kernels go to the bottom.

When applying herself to the goose, from its breast she drew a lusty liver, and then told me my future fortune. But that no mark of the murder might be left, she fixt the rent goose to a spit, which, as she said, she had fatten’d a little before, as sensible it was to die.

In the mean time the wine went briskly round, and now the old women gladly devour the goose, they so lately lamented; when they had pickt its bones, Enothea, half drunk, turn’d to me; “and now,” said she, “I’ll finish the charm that recovers your strength”: When drawing out a leathern ensign of Priapus, she dipt it in a medley of oyl, small pepper, and the bruis’d seed of nettles, paulatim coepit inserere ano meo. Hoc crudelissima anus spurgit subinde umore femina mea. Nasturcii sucum cum abrotano miscet perfusisque inguinibus meis viridis urticae fascem comprehendit, omniaque infra umbilicum coepit lenta manu caedere. Upon which jumping from her, to avoid the sting, I made off. The old woman in a great rage pursu’d me, and tho’ drunk with wine, and their more hot desires, took the right way; and follow’d me through two or three villages, crying stop thief; but with my hands all bloody, in the hasty flight, I got off.

National Gallery of Art
THE KISS
by Rodin

Metropolitan Museum of Art
BESIDE THE SEA
by Rodin

Love manifestations and the passion for promoting weakened or inadequate functional activity are familiar themes in the most remote areas of the world. In the Arctic circle as well as in the Marshall Islands. Among the Eskimo of uttermost Greenland and among the Jibaro Indians of Equador. The Orang Kubau of Sumatra and the Semang and Senoi of Malacca are knowledgeable in this regard. The natives of these disparate territories are familiar with the plant and animal life of their regions, the nuts and fruits, the herbs and leaves, and their properties and specific virtues. They have tested them in food and drink, and in other functional directions: and by long, groping, deductive sequences they have come to definite practical conclusions. They have managed to extract or to use certain essences and elements in these roots and plants that they found conducive to specific purposes, particularly to the primary function of life, the erotic motif, the functional performance.

Oral traditions, the ways of the tribal society, derive, pre-historically, from a matriarchal hierarchy. And to the women of the tribe the obscure secrets of amorous practices and devices are all-important. Because they are the conditions of procreation, the source of fertility, the depositories of life and continuity. The love mystique, then, is the primary and virtually exclusive sacrosanct knowledge confined to the female of the tribe. Hence, after the ages of oral transmission, when we enter upon the centuries of writing, verbal transcription, and recording, then the sagas and chronicles, the legends and folk consciousness, invariably dwell on the female, the wise old woman, the witch, the adept, who possesses the arcana of erotic functions.

In the course of undetermined time, as literary mastery grows and develops culturally to the degree attained by Greece in the fifth century B.C., the witch, as guardian of Aphrodite’s mysteries, is paramount. She is known to the peasant and the hoplite, to the cobbler and the young athlete, to the stroller in the agora, to the serious dramatist, even to the philosophers, to Socrates, to Plato.

In classical legend, Phaon, a ferryman of Lesbos, was given a potent periapt by Aphrodite, that made him remarkably handsome. The poetess Sappho consequently fell passionately in love with him. According to the Roman encyclopedist Pliny the Elder, author of the Historia Naturalis, Phaon had found a mandrake root that resembled the male genitalia. This root was an assurance of feminine love. Sappho, however, is said, in the version of Ovid’s Heroides, to have flung herself from the Leucadian rock on his account.

Xenophon, the Greek historian who belongs in the fourth century B.C., recounts, in his Memorabilia, a dialogue between the philosopher Socrates and a hetaira named Theodote. The subject is the art of finding and retaining lovers.

Socrates: There are my lady friends, who will never let me leave them, night or day. They would always be having me teach them love-charms and incantations.

Theodote: Are you really acquainted with such things, Socrates?

Socrates: Of course I am. What else is the reason, think you, that Apollodorus and Antisthenes never leave my side? Why have Cebes and Simmias come all the way from Thebes to stay with me? You may be quite sure that not without love-charms and incantations and magic-wheels can this be brought about.

Theodote: Lend me your wheel, then, that I may use it on you.

Socrates: Nay, I do not want to be drawn to you. I want you to come to me.

Theodote: Well, I will come. But be sure to be at home.

Socrates: I will be at home to you, unless there be some lady with me who is dearer than yourself.

A speech attributed to the Greek orator Antiphon, who dates in the fifth century B.C., involves a belief that love could be secured by the administration of a potion.

The Attic orator is addressing the court:

The girl began to consider how she should administer the potion to them, before or after dinner, and, on reflection, she decided it would be better to give it after the meal. I will endeavor to give you a brief account of how the potion was actually administered. The two friends partook of a good dinner, as you can imagine, the host having a sacrifice to offer to the god of his household and the guest being on the eve of a sea voyage. When they had finished, they made a libation and added thereto some grains of incense. But while they were murmuring their prayer, the concubine slipped the poison into the wine she was pouring out for them: and furthermore, thinking that she was doing something clever, she gave Philoneos an extra dose, supposing that the more she gave the warmer would be his love for her.

The important deduction that follows as a corollary from the above passage is that the love-potion, mentioned without elaborate comment, was already, in the fifth century B.C., a matter of common knowledge and common use.

The plant called anciently telephilon was used by the Greeks for amatory purposes. Botanically, it has been identified with the poppy: and by some, with a kind of pepper tree. Theocritus, the Greek bucolic poet, refers to its use in the third Idyll. A goatherd goes to the cave of his sweet-heart Amaryllis. He tries to re-awaken her former love:

I learned my fate but lately, when upon my bethinking me whether you loved me, not even did the poppy leaf coming in contact make a sound, but withered away just so upon my soft arm.

Lovers were accustomed to guess by the poppy leaf placed between forefinger and thumb of the left hand, and then struck by the right, whether their love was reciprocated. If a loud crack was produced, it was a propitious amatory omen.

Among the ancient authorities the virtues of plants and herbs and spices and their medicinal curative powers and also their amatory impacts were frequently enumerated, described, and classified. In this group belongs Dioscorides, a Greek army surgeon who flourished in the first century A.D. His comprehensive treatise on the subject, De Materia Medica Libri Quinque, was for centuries consulted and used as a standard text. In the Middle Ages the famous Portuguese Marrano physician Amatus Lusitanus produced an excellent edition of Dioscorides. It was published, with numerous woodcut illustrations, at Leyden in Holland, in 1558.

According to the Enquiry into Plants by Theophrastus, and equally to the Materia Medica of the Greek army surgeon Dioscorides, cyclamen, which is sowbread, had erotic properties. The root of the plant was used as an ingredient in love-potions.

The plant itself produces colorful flowers, while the fleshy roots are favored by swine: hence the old name of sowbread.

The Greek physician Dioscorides, who served as a surgeon in the army of the Roman Emperor Nero, mentions, in his Materia Medica, mandrake as being anciently considered efficacious in love philtres. He also alludes to the practice in his own days, when a concoction of the root of mandrake steeped in wine was judged to be a favorable love-potion.

In the furious and unceasing search for some product of the earth, some fabricated distillation, some suddenly and miraculously discovered triumphant panacea that would efficaciously induce virile activity, the ancients grasped at any object that, by its mere outward and physical conformation, might conceivably have some cryptic, symbolic association with genital resemblances, and hence with amatory functions.

Such a resemblance was readily and gratefully found in the mandrake. The mandrake, even in Biblical times, was credited with unique properties, not least, with amatory stimulation.

Mandrake, or mandragore, which is botanically mandragora, mandragora officinarum, is a tuber with purple flowers, dark-leaved. It is native to Palestine, and hence has a Hebrew name, mentioned in Biblical literature. It is called there dudaim, an expression associated etymologically with love.

The peculiarity of mandrake is that it often assumes a human shape, the limbs in particular being formed like human extremities.

From the earliest literary eras mandrake was a customary ingredient in love-potions. Circe, the sorceress who appears in Homer’s Odyssey, was traditionally an adept in concocting brews with mandrake infusions. So intimately was her name linked with this man-shaped plant, that it became known as Circe’s plant.

As later Biblical confirmation of the significance of mandrake, the strange and moving episode of Jacob and Rachel and the employment of the very effective mandrake may be mentioned.

There is a further suggestion of its use in the Song of Songs.

The Greeks and the Romans likewise were acquainted with mandrake and its virtues. The Greeks considered the root an amatory excitant, and, by association, called Aphrodite, who presided over amatory functions, Mandragoritis, She of the Mandrake. Plutarch, the Greek philosopher and biographer, alludes to the plant and its resemblance to human genitalia. In his monumental encyclopedia, the Natural History, the Roman Pliny the Elder similarly dwells on this likeness, and adds that when a mandrake root that has grown into male genital form is found, it will unquestionably secure feminine love.

Without interruption the tradition of the mandrake lingered through the centuries. Old chroniclers allude to it. Woodcuts and illustrations in medieval vellum-bound folios present readers with the horrifyingly semi-human form of the plant. Sinister and abhorrent legends have grown up around the plant, many of them associated with death, gibbets, hangings, thieves.

Medieval folklore trusted to the consumption of the root as a reliable help in conception. This belief is also confirmed by a seventeenth century traveler. Sorcerers and alchemists and other occult practitioners concocted their elixirs with the aid of mandrake.

The seventeenth century English herbalist, John Gerarde, refers to mandrake in his Herball or General Historie of Plantes, and to its use in conception, particularly in the case of barrenness. He merely touches on its employment in amatory practices, but he is repulsed by the prurient and salacious nature of these devices.

In these days, too, mandrake evidently has not been neglected as a possible invigorating agent. In Greece and in Italy, folk beliefs in the plant still survive, and are put into active practice.

Sexual and procreative capacity was such a primal, essential factor in the old religious cults that, in classical mythology, Greek and Roman, and in Egyptian and Asian cults as well, the bull, the most potent among animals, was the ceremonial and pictorial symbol of this cosmic power. The bull, in fact, was equated with divinity. The processional sacrifice among the Romans, the taurobolium, highlighted the preeminence and the reverence due to the bull. In Egypt, he appears as Apis, the bull-god. He is also present in the Mithraic cult, and Mithra himself is sculpturally represented as holding a bull and cutting its throat. The bull was an expiatory sacrifice among the Germanic tribes, and also among the Northmen. In the Orient, too, the bull is sacred among the Japanese. Cows, also, have been no less venerated among the Greeks, the Hebrews, and the Hindus.

An ancient Egyptian record, the Doulaq Papyrus, reveals, in the translation by the famous Egyptologist Sir William Flinders Petrie, how even in antiquity sexual passion was channeled, promoted, and controlled: and how the cult of money and the phallic cult often went hand in hand and were intimately linked together. So that religious prostitution, the sacred erotic rites of pagan worship, transcended the common activities of the public prostitute and assumed a hieratic, reverential status.

This status is stressed and confirmed in the story of the sacred prostitute or hierodule Thubui, who was approached by Setna-Khamois, son of the Egyptian Pharaoh Usimares. In the papyrus the lavish richness of the hierodule’s apartment is described, and the bloody conditions she exacts from her passionate prospective lover.

In the barber shops and the perfumers’, in the furtive taverns and the baths and eating places, in Greece and later on in Rome, the lower types of prostitute plied their trade. They might ostensibly be musicians and singers of a sort, but these qualifications were mere preliminaries to their more intimate ministrations. The ways of these harlots, their outlook, their training, their future, are described vividly in Lucian’s Dialogues of the Courtesans and in Alciphron’s fictional letters. The poets, too, have their say about this institution, and many of their pieces, sensuous and sensual, erotic, scatological and lewd, are preserved in the Greek Anthology and the Palatine Anthology. In the collection known as The Girdle of Aphrodite, one of the pieces deals with the theme of Lolita. Another describes the operations of a masseuse. Others deal with amorous performances and reflect on love and its price.

The ancient cult of Bacchus, the god of wine and fertility, was marked by highly erotic rites and orgies and phallic manifestations. Bacchus himself was equated with the Greek god Dionysus, whose characteristics and functions were identical. Dionysus himself was associated with certain animals that were reputedly extremely lascivious by nature or erotically exceptionally dominant. Among these animals were: the bull, the ass, the panther, and the goat. The right testis of the ass, for instance, worn in a bracelet, was, according to the testimony of Pliny the Elder, who produced an encyclopedic Natural History, and the Greek physician Dioscorides, considered an effective sexual stimulant.

In many regions of ancient Greece, both on the mainland but particularly in the islands of the Aegean Sea, the Dionysiac cult was prevalent and passionately celebrated.

Euripides, the Greek tragic poet, presents a detailed and authoritative picture of Bacchic ceremonies and beliefs in his drama The Bacchae.

Among the priests of ancient Chaldea, noted for its thaumaturgic practices and esoteric cults, there was a tradition that the secretions of the liver of young boys would be a restorative of physiological vigor.

Among professional Greek and Roman courtesans, there were special devices for provoking male interest. During entertainments, for instance, drinking cups, made of earthenware, emitted a perfumed aura, while the contents themselves, containing myrrh and pepper, were direct stimulants.

In Asia Minor, some four millennia ago, the Sumerians flourished and produced a high literary culture. There is still extant a love song, chanted annually by the Sumerians, that is in the manner of the Biblical Song of Songs. It is an exultant amatory paean, dedicated to Inanna, the Sumerian goddess of love and procreation, who may be equated with the Babylonian Astarte and the Greek Aphrodite.

Storgethron, a plant used in ancient Greece as an amatory medicine, has been identified as the leek.

The root called surag was, in antiquity, held to have a stimulative virtue.

The aromatic leaves of tarragon, which grows in South East Europe, is considered, in addition to its use as a flavoring agent, as an amatory aid.

The oil extracted from the fresh leaves of the ruta graveolens plant produces an amatory excitation.

Both in ancient and in medieval days amatory virtues were attributed to the plant known botanically as radix Chinae.

The juice of the plant spurge, in composition with other items such as ginger, nettle seed, pellitory, cinnamon, and cardamom, is considered, among Arabs, as highly provocative.

The aromatic leaves of sage had an amatory repute. So with tulip bulbs and savory which the Romans knew as satureia.

Hierobota, or pisteriona, an herb mentioned by the medieval philosopher Albertus Magnus, was credited with such potency that its mere possession was said to act as a stimulant.

Pimpinella anisum, which is the botanical designation of anise, is native to the Eastern Mediterranean region. The ancients knew anise, and it was equally familiar to the Middle Ages, as a love attribute.

The testes of animals have always been popular in amatory preparations, both for their symbolic implications and also for their genesiac value. This was the case with the testes of lamb, deer, ram, and ass.

The head of the perch contains a number of small stones. These were included in the amatory preparations devised by sorceresses.

A French physician, Mery, in a treatise entitled Traité Universel des Drogues Simples, stated that the partes genitales of a rooster served as a potent stimulus.

Partridge was, according to the old writer Platina, in his De Valetudine Tuenda, believed, apart from its gastronomic relish, to ‘arouse the half-extinct desire for venereal pleasures.’

In antiquity, snails were consumed for amatory purposes. The Roman poets refer to this practice. Even in modern times a concoction of snails, boiled in parsley, garlic, and onions, and fried in oil and again in red wine, is reputed to serve as a rejuvenating factor.

An ancient Egyptian device for achieving amatory efficiency involves a magic procedure:

Take a band of linen, of sixteen threads. Four of them white. Four, green. Four, blue. Four, red. Fasten all strands into one band, and strain with hoopoe blood. Bind with scarab posed as the sun-god wrapped in byssus. Bind to the body of the boy attendant who holds the sacred vessel.

The worship of the phallus in antiquity was not originally the worship of the human generative organs, but of the divine procreative faculty symbolized by the genitalia of the sacred bull and the sacred goat: in Egyptian religious terminology, by Apis and Priapis or Priapus respectively.

In Greece, the phallus, originally symbolic of the goat or bull, was attached, disproportionately and a posteriori, to a human figure: so that the phallus, in the course of time, became erroneously associated with human capacity.

The Athenian orator Isocrates postulated a maxim: What is improper to do is improper to say. Yet a rigid adherence to this view would mean a cessation of investigations of all kinds, of many historical records and archives, mores, and often matter that would give enlightenment on human traditions and the more intimate details of communal, tribal, or national life, of ethnic distinctions, of cultural progression.

Hence it might be more advisable to adapt the postulate of Isocrates and to introduce the proviso that whatever has been done or said or written by men should normally and regularly be transmitted to later generations or to wider circles, provided that this transmission is intended as a contribution to a knowledge of the past, or of contiguous races, or of disparate mores, and as a revealing exposition of what man performed in earlier ages, and not as a prurient and lewd inducement to wallow in scatological or libidinous depths for mere light or indifferent or transitory entertainment.

The anthropologist, the archaeologist, the professional scholar, the historian are, by virtue of their interests and training and their occupations, constantly dealing with subjects that have either been taboo in a general sense, or that involve the most secretive physiological and emotional human situations.

The ancient cult of the stars merged with religious ceremonials and religious beliefs, emerging in the zodiacal bull. This bull was anciently equated with the sun in its most auspicious phase, in spring time. The sun bull later became the actual bull itself, as in the Minoan and the Mithraic cults, and also among the Egyptians. For the bull was now definitely the symbol of creative potency, of cosmic fecundity and perpetuation.

The energized, salient phallus was the supreme symbol of being and fertility. In antiquity it had divine significance. It was carried in religious processions in ancient Egypt, in Greece, in the Greek islands, in Phoenicia, Assyria, and in Chaldea and Ethiopia. In Egypt, phalli, made of porcelain, were worn on the person as periapts.

In their fulminations against pagan mores and the sexual and erotic licentiousness and aberrations that were so prevalent in antiquity both socially and religiously, the ancient writers themselves were so descriptively forthright and detailed in their denunciations, that these very assaults and condemnatory attacks constitute in themselves, cumulatively, a vast corpus of circumstantial knowledge of ancient salaciousness, prurience, perversions, and total abandonment of amatory and sexual restraints. Among such witnesses and authorities were the Church Fathers Tertullian, Arnobius, and Clement of Alexandria.

The religious practice of women submitting or rather offering themselves to the priapic symbol, the phallus or lingam, dates back to millennia before this era. Herodotus, the Greek historian, mentions it; also Strabo the geographer, and the Church Father Clement of Alexandria.

Among the ancient Moabites, the god Baal-Peor, that was at one time worshipped by the Israelites and then execrated, was an idol equated with the Greek and Roman phallic Priapus.

The consciousness that in Nature, in the totality of the cosmic scheme, and in human beings the love motif conditions all existence and the continuance of being is manifest in the images, the religious rituals, symbols, ceremonials, and sacrificial offerings of all peoples, in every age, ancient and modern, in Greece and among the Romans, in pre-conquered Mexico and in India, throughout the East and in the Pacific Islands, and among the early tribal and racial denominations of Europe—the Germani and the Suevi, the Galli and the Normanni.

On the banks of the Euphrates, in Syria, there was anciently a vast, elaborate, richly decorated and endowed temple. At the entrance rose two gigantic phalli, dedicated, as the inscription ran, by Bacchus to the goddess Juno. Offerings were made to the phalli by the thronging suppliants, while within the building numerous wooden phalli were dispersed throughout the spacious interior. Similar images and rituals were manifest in contiguous countries, in Phoenicia, Persia, and Phrygia.

Throughout every polis and colony and settlement of ancient Greece, and also in the regions of the Mediterranean littoral, in Egypt and the Middle East, the phallus was a symbol of veneration always associated with religious ritual, with hieratic traditions, and temple worship on a wide and enthusiastic scale.

In Greece, there were the phallic hermae, enormous phalli attached to pedestals, tree-trunks, boundary-markers. They were protective and apotropaic, and where the phalli appeared, there would credibly be fecundity and erotic consummation, generation and abundance, in man and beast and throughout the cosmic design.

The phallus was variously named Priapus and Tutunus and Mutunus and Fascinum and, in Hindu religious mythology, the lingam. Among the esoteric Gnostics, Jao, the sun-god, equipped with ithyphallic force, had properties akin to those of Priapus. Thus the generative, energizing organs of virility, of the cosmic erotic impulse and of its purpose, are, despite variations of name and epichorial traits and accretions, basically comprehended under one concept, in all proto-history, in verifiable history, and, by traditional progression, in later ages.

Antiquity, free from the modern attitude that makes demarcations between what is obscene and what is not so, venerated the sexual act, and its symbolic representation of the phallus, as significant of the universal sense of generation and procreation. As a consequence, all sexual, all amatory performances, references, allusions were accepted as an integral element in human life, and involved no intrusive image of salaciousness, prurience, lewdness.

This phallic reverence, in its widest and most sweeping sense, was especially prevalent among the ancient Greeks. But it was not confined to this people. It was prevalent in Asia Minor, among the Hittites and the Sumerians, the Accadians and the Parthians, the Medes and the Babylonians and the Phoenicians. It was prevalent in Egypt and the North African littoral, and it was equally prevalent along the Mediterranean coastal regions. In the Far East, particularly but not exclusively in India, the cult of the phallus was a devout religious experience, equated with the dominant cults of the cosmic deities.

In later ages, when the human body became as it were dichotomous in function, the merely physiological acts began to be held in lesser esteem, and even became condemnatory in status, open to reproach and disdain, and even violent abuse and ill-treatment. The body, in fact, became obscene, invested with evil forces, compounded of malefic and defiled factors. The body was to be crushed and tortured and disfigured, in order to release the spiritual complements of the human being. The amatory acts were now turned into licentious and mephitic obscenities, into bestial defilements, into unspeakable carnal and animal manifestations of the lower nature. As a consequence, phallic worship, the glorification of the creative principle embodied in the male and female, went underground. And by the mere fact of going underground, it persisted, with qualifications, acquiring through the course of time veneers of secrecy, accretions of furtiveness, elements of ribaldry as a kind of protective coat.

Essentially, the phallic symbol was anciently viewed as an amatory agent, a generative stimulant, in as much as the phallus was cosmically the source of all being. Therefore offerings were made to the phallus in sacrificial rituals, just as to any other potent deity from whom privileges and favors were sought. Libations of milk were a normal form of offering to Priapus. Women, anxious to become mothers, stood reverently and suppliantly in puris naturalibus before the all-potent phalli, and in a further urgent procedure, performed the act of erotic consummation with the aid of the lingam figure itself. For the phallus, in a pose of lubricity, was the final appeal, the ultimate resort, of the pleading, awed, reverential mortal.

Among cities where the generative force symbolized by the phallus was held in deep veneration, were Orneae, Cyllene, and Colophon. Under the later impact of Christianity, however, the phallic cult diminished in its influence and extent, or was re-directed into other channels. In one specific direction, the cult merged into the Orphic mysteries.

Erotic awareness never went further than in the case of a city in Troas named Priapus, on account of its consecration to the cult of the phallus. There were other cities too, according to the testimony of Pliny the Elder, that were named Priapus for identical reasons. In the Ceramic Gulf there was an island named Priaponese: and an island in the Aegean Sea called Priapus.

A notorious incident in Greek history involved the nocturnal mutilation of hermae, in 415 B.C. Hermae were bronze or marble pillars surmounted by a head and a phallus. These marble figures appeared in the streets and squares of Athens and other Greek cities.

Suspicion for the defilement and desecration of the hermae fell upon the brilliant but wayward Athenian general and statesman Alcibiades and his companions. As a result, Alcibiades was condemned to banishment.

The cult of Priapus and his obscene association with the genitalia of the ass, the symbol of unbridled lust, were expounded in ancient fable and legend. Other commentaries and explanations were added later by Hyginus, who flourished in the first century A.D. Hyginus wrote on religious subjects and mystic cults. Pausanias, the Greek traveler and geographer, who belongs in the second century A.D., and Lactantius, the fourth century Church Father, also dwelt on the subject.

Of all cities of ancient Greece, Lampsacus, situated on the banks of the Hellespont, was most dedicated to the veneration of Priapus. In a legendary fable it was demonstrated that the origin of the priapic cult was Lampsacus itself.

In the Greek festival called Thargelia, celebrated in May, the rites were dedicated to Apollo, the sun god, and to Diana, the moon goddess. At the ceremonial there was a procession of youths who carried olive branches hung with food, fruit, and images of phalli.

The genesiac theme, in its most lustful implication, was so prevalent in early history that there was a sect, known as the Baptae, dedicated to Cotytto, an obscene and lewd goddess. They celebrated their nocturnal abominations at Athens, Corinth, in Thrace, and on the island of Chios.

One of the peculiar features of the Baptae was their custom of drinking from glass vessels shaped like a phallus. Juvenal, the Roman satirist, in describing the Baptae and their mystic and symbolic rites, refers to one participant who drinks from a glass Priapus: vitreo bibit ille Priapo.

According to the testimony of the Greek historian Herodotus, a certain Melampus brought the cult of Bacchus, the worship of the generative capacity, to Greece, approximately in the thirteenth century B.C. He expounded the features of the Egyptian cult and established processional rites and ceremonies adapted from Egyptian usage.

In ancient Greece Bacchus, the phallic divinity, was equated with Dionysus. In the cities the Greater Dionysia, or the Urban Dionysia, were celebrated in his honor for three days. The locale was at Limnae in Attica, and the season was the middle of the month of March.

In very early times, the Greek biographer and philosopher Plutarch declares, the rites were of a simple but joyous nature. But in his own time the celebration had reached a lavish, extravagant splendor.

Women, devotees of the Bacchic symbol and known as Bacchantes, introduced the ritualistic procession. Chaste maidens, impeccable in morality and of distinguished birth, followed. These were the Canephoroi, the Basket-bearers who bore on their heads baskets containing the sacred utensils used at the celebration: together with mystic objects, flowers, salt, sesame, and a flower-bedecked phallus. A detachment came next to the Canephoroi: these were the Phallophoroi. The Phallophoroi were the Phallus-bearers, carrying, attached to long staffs, the phallic emblem.

Musicians were also in the march, chanting and accompanying the choral odes with twanging strings, and at brief intervals emitting loud exclamations in glorification of the god.

There were other strange participants. The Ithyphalli, men dressed in women’s garments, who chanted salacious phallic songs. Scandalous satyrs led goats for sacrifice, while Bacchantes performed obscene dance movements. There was, over the entire celebration, an atmosphere of debauchery and libidinous license consonant with the phallic context of the cult.

In Carthage, a spot outside the city was consecrated to Astarte, the goddess of generation, and called Sicca Veneria. Among the Phoenicians a similar spot, intended for the same purpose, that is religious fornication, was known as Siccoth Venoth.

In Biblical antiquity, the primary concept was for man to be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth. To this end, concubinage was consequently not frowned upon and was practiced pari passu with marriage. Maid servants were commonly taken by their masters as concubines, as in the case of Hagar, and also in that of Reumah. Lot even gave his maiden daughters for the satisfaction of the lustful inhabitants of Sodom. Later, he committed incest with these daughters.

The servant women of Jacob, Bilhah and Zilpah, became his concubines. These are instances, among many others, that illustrate cases of adultery and fornication that do not appear to have had a condemnatory stigma or reproach attached to them. For the object in these circumstances was procreation and propagation and that was the primal function enjoined upon man.

The corollary is that sterility is a personal reproach in Biblical times, a social defect that is looked upon with opprobrium, particularly in Oriental countries.

In Spain, the phallic cult was practiced under the name of Hortanes. This cult is mentioned by the Roman epic poet, Silius Italicus, in his Punica. He describes the orgiastic revels of Satyrs and Maenads in nocturnal rites in honor of the Hispanic fascinum.

In the South of France, also, and in Belgium, excavations unearthed relics, monuments, amulets and other artifacts, bas-reliefs and antiquities of various kinds, all testifying to the ancient cult of Priapus and his functions and the deep and wide reverence for his omnipotence. In Germany, Priapus lost the somewhat indulgent character of a phallic and generative deity responsive to supplication and promise, and became a violent, blood-lusting monstrosity. In parts of Eastern Europe, again, Priapus became Pripe-Gala, sanguinary and destructive.

Ancient Armenia had a deity analogous to Priapus or Aphrodite or Astarte. She was known as Diana Anaïtis, and her cult involved temple prostitution. The same practice, on the testimony of the Greek historian Herodotus, was in vogue in Lydia. Another writer, the Roman geographer Pomponius Mela, who belongs in the first century A.D., has similar references in the case of an African people called the Augilae.

Again, the practice was prevalent at Naucratis, in Egypt.

The phallic cult, that was originally consecrated to the propagation of all things, in as much as the fascinum itself symbolized the sacred regeneration of all Nature, in time degenerated so that only the phallus as such became the symbol of lust and passion and debauchery. It became the emblem of excesses in erotic encounters, the sign of the prostitute. Priapus actually became an object of some contempt, a humble scarecrow of the fields, chthonic guardian of the orchards, a subject of coarse ribaldry, as is testified in the Latin corpus of poems known under the name of Priapeia.

The lascivious mores of the Egyptians under the guise of veneration of the priapic bull Apis, and their obscene dances, rituals, and similar performances are described and commented on in great detail by Herodotus in his History of the Persian Wars.

The genitalia and all references to the phallic image were in very ancient times held in such sacred esteem and reverence that in Biblical literature the inviolable sanctity of an oath was ratified by touching the area of the genitalia, or the thigh, to use the Biblical euphemism. The Hebrews especially held the generative organs in the greatest respect, socially, ethnically, and religiously: and nudity as a consequence was a matter of shameful stigma and opprobrium.

Among the Moslems too the most binding oath was taken with respect to the sanctity of the genitalia.

In Egypt, in the temple of Isis, sacred prostitution was a regular religious practice. Reference to this circumstance is made by the Roman satirist, Juvenal, who calls Isis a procuress and her shrine a rendez-vous for adulterous and libidinous practices.

Among symbolic emblems that represented, in combination, the male and female principles of generation and fecundity, were the Egyptian crux ansata and the seal of Solomon.

The phallic symbol was so pervasive, so potent, in the lives of the ancients, that the priapic function and the erotic variations of the generative performance were pictorially represented in every conceivable form of reproduction: scenes on vases representing perverted consummations: baskets filled with phalli that were offered for sale to yearning women: ithyphallic figures: monuments, lamps and other objects depicting orgiastic lubricities.

In Ezekiel 16.17 there is a reference to the phallic figure: Fecisti tibi imagines masculinas et fornicata es in eis.

In one of the bucolic Idyls of the Greek poet Theocritus (c. 310–c. 250 B.C.) the maiden Simaetha, in love with Delphis, who has abandoned her, attempts to regain his love by performing certain magic rites and making invocations to Selene, Aphrodite, and the horrendous Hecate.

She fashions a wax image of Delphis and by sympathetic magic anticipates the melting of his heart in correspondence with the melting of the image.

In addition, she makes use of the magic wheel, and her refrain throughout the performance is:

My magic wheel, draw home to me

The man I love!

Intertwined with these rituals is the further refrain, addressed to Selene, the moon goddess:

Bethink thee of my love,

And whence it came,

My Lady Moon!

In his De Sanitate Tuenda Praecepta, Advice on keeping Well, Plutarch, the Greek philosopher and biographer, comments on lust and potions:

While we loathe and detest women who contrive philtres and magic to use upon their husbands, we entrust our food and provisions to hirelings and slaves to be all but bewitched and drugged. If the saying of Arcesilaus, addressed to the adulterous and licentious, appears too bitter, to the effect that ‘it makes no difference whether a man practices lewdness in the front parlor or in the back hall,’ yet it is not without its application to our subject. For in very truth, what difference does it make whether a man employ aphrodisiacs to stir and excite licentiousness for the purpose of pleasure or whether he stimulate his taste by odors and sauces to require, like the itch, continual scratchings and ticklings.

(Loeb)

In Greek mythology, Andromache, the wife of the Trojan warrior Hector, was accused by Hermione, wife of Neoptolemus, of gaining his love by means of love-potions. Euripides, the tragic poet (c. 485–406 B.C.), refers to the situation in his drama Andromache:

Not of my philtres thy lord hateth thee,

But that thy nature is no mate for his.

That is the love-charm: woman, ’tis not beauty

That witcheth bridegrooms, nay, but nobleness.

Philtres were in actual use beyond mythological times. Xenophon (c. 430–354 B.C.), the Greek historian, author of Memorabilia, alludes to the practice:

“They say,” replied Socrates, “that there are certain incantations which those who know them chant to whomsoever they please, and thus make them their friends; and that there are also love potions which those who know them administer to whomso they will; and are in consequence loved by them.”

Propertius, however, the Roman elegiac poet (c. 48 B.C.–16 B.C.), refers to the futility of love potions:

Here herbs are of no avail,

nor nocturnal Cytaeis,

nor grasses brewed by the

hand of Perimede.

Cytaeis is the witch Medea: while Perimede is another witch, called by Homer Agamede.

The Bacchic cult in Egypt is described by the Greek historian Herodotus in Book 2 of his History of the Persian Wars:

To Bacchus, on the eve of his feast, every Egyptian sacrifices a hog before the door of his house, which is then given back to the swineherd by whom it was furnished, and by him carried away. In other respects the festival is celebrated almost exactly as Bacchic festivals are in Greece, excepting that the Egyptians have no choral dances. They also use instead of phalli another invention, consisting of images a cubit high, pulled by strings, which the women carry round to the villages. A piper goes in front, and the women follow, singing hymns in honor of Bacchus. They give a religious reason for the peculiarities of the image.

In Book 5 of The History of the Persian Wars, Herodotus describes some of the marital customs of the Thracians:

The Thracians who live above the Crestonaeans observe the following customs. Each man among them has several wives; and no sooner does a man die than a sharp contest ensues among the wives upon the question, which of them all the husband loved most tenderly; the friends of each eagerly plead on her behalf, and she to whom the honor is adjudged, after receiving the praises both of men and women, is slain over the grave by the hand of her next of kin, and then buried with her husband. The others are sorely grieved, for nothing is considered such a disgrace.

The Thracians who do not belong to these tribes have the customs which follow. They sell their children to traders. On their maidens they keep no watch, but leave them altogether free, while on the conduct of their wives they keep a most strict watch. Brides are purchased of their parents for large sums of money.... The gods which they worship are but three, Mars, Bacchus, and Dian.

An ancient Hittite text contains invocations and rituals intended to remedy conditions of incapacity or lack of erotic desire.

A sacrifice is performed to Uliliyassis, continuing for three days. Food is prepared: sacrificial loaves, grain, a pitcher of wine. The shirt of the male suppliant is brought forth.

The suppliant bathes. He twines cords of red and of white wool. A sheep is sacrificed. An invocation is made, beseeching help and favor: Come to this man, the cry arises. Come down to this man. Make his wife conceive and let him beget sons and daughters.

An Egyptian love song, belonging in the second millennium B.C., is still extant. The love song was usually chanted to a musical accompaniment. The lover is addressed as sister, or brother.

The heart is sick from love, laments the victim, and no physician, no magician can heal this disease, except the appearance of the sister. There is abundant reference to spices, to myrrh and incense, and the tone of the amatory supplications and yearnings is the tone of the Song of Songs. Listlessness on the part of the love-sick suppliant is banished, as soon as he beholds his beloved, as soon as her arms open in embrace.

In ancient orgiastic cults, particularly those dedicated to Dionysus and to the Syrian Baal, religious frenzies were accompanied or stimulated by drugs, fermented drink, by rhythmic dance movements, by tambourine, drum, and flute music that culminated in ecstatic self-mutilation followed by wild sexual debaucheries.

Passion, lust, incest, fornication, adultery, as well as concubinage and polygamy, most of the sexual perversions and aberrations that are now included under medico-psychiatric categories, occur in the Bible, in both Testaments.

King David married eight women. On his flight from Absalom he left ten concubines behind him. Jacob had two wives. King Solomon had seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines.

There are instances of enduring affection too, as in the case of Jacob, who labored for Rachel for fourteen years.

There is sudden, rapturous love at first sight, at all costs:

It happened, late one afternoon, when David arose from his couch and was walking upon the roof of the king’s house, that he saw from the roof a woman bathing, and the woman was very beautiful. And David sent and inquired about the woman. And one said, “Is not this Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite?”

So David sent messengers and took her, and he lay with her.

Amnon is overwhelmed by a passionate infatuation for his half sister Tamar. He was so tormented that he made himself sick because of his sister. He is advised by his friend Jonadab to go to bed and claim illness. Tamar brings him food and at this point Amnon attempts seduction. When she suggests an approach to the king, for permission to marry Amnon, his lust overpowers him, and he consummates his passion. After which, in a frenzy of hate, he banishes her.

The Song of Solomon is a paean to sexual love, an erotic exultation, the apogee of amatory sensuality.

In the New Testament, too, there is frequent reference to harlots and debauchees and to a variety of ‘sinners.’

Babylonian customs, in addition to the rites of temple prostitution, included both male and female sacred concubines. There was considerable pre-marital sexual freedom. But there was also monogamous marriage involving rigid fidelity. Trial marriage was acknowledged. Adultery was punished by drowning the guilty wife. In the degenerative days of Babylon, morality broke down. Male prostitutes rouged their cheeks and bedecked themselves with jewelry, while the poor exposed their daughters to prostitution. Sensuality and erotic libertinage became dominant and pervasive.

Among the Canaanites the most potent deities—Baal and El and Asherah—were the symbols of procreation and sexuality. Hence, all acts, all objects, all rituals associated with copulation, with the phallus, with fecundity were divinely inspired and inherently sacred. Ceremonials dedicated to the deities invariably included sexual activity, sacred and ecstatic orgies. The voluptuous and sensual character of the dedicatory rites was evidently so appealing that they lured the Israelites into acceptance and imitation, for the deity of the Israelites was one, supreme, without kin, without consort, without sexuality.

The New Testament attacks pagans, particularly Roman paganism, for unnatural sexual practices, lusts, and corrupt and degenerate mores.

In primitive Greek society, under a primal matriarchy, the male functioned as a kind of passive sexual partner, and virtually thereafter as a domestic drudge.

But in the course of the centuries the male acquired dominance, in the divine pantheon, and equally on a mortal and earthly plane, politically, socially, and domestically.

But the concept of the inter-relationship of the sexes grew into a concept of one primary harmonious principle of aesthetics, of essential perfection of beauty, irrespective of sex and hence irrespective of any compulsive admiration and appreciation of such beauty by one sex or the other. Beauty became an entity in itself, a sexless trait. In the Platonic dialogue, in fact, in the Symposium, the theory is postulated that man was at one time androgynous.

The Greek hetaira or male companion was virtually a prostitute. Sometimes she acquired a more permanent status, when she was bought by a master and became a pallakis or concubine.

Homosexuality, on the other hand, brought no stigma to the boys or young men involved in the practice. Because homosexuality was a corollary, applied in practice, of the primary concept of aesthetic beauty irrespective of sex.

In the case of women, there was the corresponding though possibly not so widespread cult of tribadism.

The Romans cultivated sexuality, particularly in a heterosexual direction, with great vigor and lustfulness. It was largely through the growing consciousness of Rome as an imperial power, and through the increase in industry and commerce, in wealth and consequent luxury and idleness, that perversions of all kinds increased and multiplied to such an abnormal extent that in the first century A.D. the Romans themselves, through their own poets, commented on the situation and contrasted it, with some sense of nostalgia, with the severe and rigid and essentially stabilized moral code that prevailed in the old pre-imperial days.

During the Roman Empire, with the increase of childless families, women were able to give more scope to their femininity, their sexual appeal, and their erotic allurements. As a consequence, there was an upsurge of marital license, on the part of both husband and wife, but notoriously so in the case of the women. This situation reached the most shameless depths, as the poet Juvenal testifies: and as the Church Fathers later on asserted, in their wholesale condemnations of pagan practices.

Early in the first century A.D. the insidious decline of domestic morality became so manifest that imperial decrees required marriage in the case of men under sixty and of women under fifty: and these ordinances also restricted the freedoms of bachelorhood.

Marriage was thus officially encouraged, and large families were granted special privileges and monetary awards from the imperial treasury. But these and similar measures were abortive in their primary purpose. For prostitution flourished and grew and became so flagrant and yet so characteristically identified with later Roman society that there were at least a score of designations for the public harlot, according to her social status, her price, and her locale. Thus lust and eros were rampantly triumphant.

Harlotry was manifestly rife in Old Testament days, for there is repeated allusion to the practice: in the symbolism of Oholah and Oholibah, in the Psalms and in the prophets, particularly Isaiah and Jeremiah, in the Book of Judges, and in Samuel.

In addition, there is mention of the allurements of the harlot: her chamber fragrant and enticing with spices and perfumes, aloes and myrrh and cinnamon.

There is reference to the personal seductive persuasiveness of the harlot’s coaxing words, the urgency of her erotic devices.

The Old Testament mentions and illustrates the morality involved in sexual impulses resulting in physiological consummations. Under certain circumstances, stoning the guilty pair was enjoined. In some cases, the man only was punished, by death. In other situations the man who spurned the woman after carnally knowing her was whipped and fined one hundred shekels of silver. For fornication, the death penalty was normally enforced. Sacred prostitution in the temple, too, whether affecting male or female, was prohibited.

Homosexuality and sacred male prostitution are both known to the Bible. In Deuteronomy there is an injunction against the sons of Israel becoming sacred prostitutes. The abominations of Sodom receive ample treatment. Even transvestism is prohibited, for it suggests sexual dubiety, physiological ambiguity, and a possible merging of the sexes, a potential elimination of the sexual demarcations. Other amatory abnormalities also appear in Biblical contexts, among them: rape, voyeurism, and bestiality.

With the onset of the Hellenistic Age, concurrent with Alexander the Great’s death in 323 B.C., the Mysteries, the exclusive secretive cults, advanced in importance and in the extent of their influence. Many of these cults came from the East and merged, with adaptations and various amplifications or modifications, into the Greek and Roman religious sphere. The cult of Cybele, Magna Mater Deorum, the Mighty Mother of the gods, was most dominant, transcending all other cults and to some degree absorbing them. In addition, there were the cults of Sabazios, of Mithras, of Isis and Osiris. These cults bound the initiates to close secrecy: and thus only occasional fragments, hints, references from various sources can present any degree of coherence and design in the cults. It is known that there were dramatic presentations involving communion with the deities, dark rites and ceremonials, even vague adumbrations of the concept of immortality, as well as castigation and castration, fertility symbolisms and seasonal fructifying cycles. There were, further, the Gnostics, searchers for divine knowledge. Some of these speculative cosmologists were scrupulously ascetic in every sense, while others orgiastically indulged, toward the attainment of the same end, in fleshly passions.

At the Greek celebration of the Phallophoria, leather or wooden representations of the phallus were carried processionally through the public streets of the polis. It was the thematic manifestation of all-embracing fertility, on land, among the beasts of the fields, and in human relationships. It was a kind of visual paean, in fact, to the primal sexual impulse, to the basic erotic conflict.

One of the earliest instances of multiple incest occurs in Book 10 of Homer’s Odyssey, in which Odysseus describes his visit to Aeolus. Aeolus has a family of six daughters and six sons, and he has given his daughters in marriage to his own sons.

In Greece the Aphrodision, and in Rome the Venereum, were the private bordellos that were not used by the general indiscriminate public.

Both in antiquity and in later ages the public baths, with both sexes in nude contacts in the balnea mixta, were a direct amatory stimulant. As further provocatives, there was, in particular cases, bathing in asses’ milk, in essences of myrtle and lavender, in rose water, in almond paste and in honey water, and also in champagne.

In Greece, the phallus was so pervasive as a genesiac symbol in every phase of daily life, that there were loaves baked in phallic form. These loaves were known, for another erotic reason, as olisbokolices.

Drillopotae were glass vessels in phallic form. They were used, in ancient Rome, as drinking cups: and thus were an added erotic reminder at banquets and similar gatherings.

In Roman antiquity the color yellow was associated with prostitutes, and was a symbol of their profession. Yellow still retained this significance in the Central European countries in later ages. In Tsarist Russia, the yellow ticket was the official prostitute’s occupational token. Alexander Kuprin’s Yama the Pit describes the situation in a vivid and grim narrative.

Figurae Veneris is a Latin expression meaning positions of Venus. This phrase refers to the range of sexual positions. The Greeks were familiar with some seventy such permutations and manipulations. There were the symplegma and the catena, which involved more than two partners, and the dodekamechanon. Hesychius the Greek lexicographer, Philaenis, and, among the Romans, the poet Martial mention these contortions. In the Middle Ages, the licentious poet Pietro Aretino produced a poetic commentary on the entire extent of erotic possibilities.

Among periapts and amulets that were credited with promoting erotic activity were charms in the shape of an extended hand, a wild boar, the head of a bull, astrological signs; magic formulas too, inscribed on various objects; the crux ansata, and genitalia.

Among erotic pieces that are no longer extant are certain elegiac poems, of an amatory type, attributed formerly to Plato the philosopher. An ancient Roman poet named Laevius wrote an erotopaegnion. Apuleius, the Roman philosopher and novelist, produced a number of amatory epigrams. These references, together with others that include Vergil’s Aeneid and the Georgics, are made by the Roman poet Ausonius himself.

He adds, also, that, like Martial and other poets, his life is unblemished though his verses may be dubious:

Igitur cui hic ludus noster non placet, ne legerit: aut cum legerit, obliviscatur: aut non oblitus, ignoscat.

Phallic priests were called phallobatai. Not only Priapus, but other deities as well in ancient Greece, were worshipped with erotic fervor. Among these were Phanes, Lordon, and Orthanes.

Metropolitan Museum of Art
LOVE AND PSYCHE
by Rodin

Philadelphia Museum of Art
THE ABDUCTOR
by Rodin

Philodemus of Gadara, who flourished in the first century B.C., was a Greek poet who settled in Rome. He became an intimate of powerful political forces, and also gathered around him a coterie of Romans interested in philosophy and literature. Among other works, mostly of a philosophical nature, Philodemus produced erotic pieces marked by extreme lewdness. Some twenty-five of these epigrams are still extant, collected in the corpus known as the Anthologia Palatina. These poems became popular in Rome and were imitated by both Horace and Ovid.

As an erotic stimulus, Greek women wore diaphanous thin-spun robes made of silk from the island of Cos. In Rome, similarly, prostitutes sometimes wore a toga vitrea—a glassy or transparent toga. There were, too, vestes sericae—silk dresses, in feminine use.

All such robes, of course, were of a purposely revealing and tantalizing nature, acting upon the viewer in a marked amatory direction. Seneca, the Roman Stoic philosopher, makes blunt and condemnatory remarks on the custom.

In Athens, there was an old quarter of the city dedicated to prostitution of the lowest type. This area was known as the Ceramicus.

The agents who acted as intermediaries, as panders and procurers and enticers in the furtive sexual commerce, in the seamy undercurrents of ancient life, were known under various descriptive designations. In Greece, there were the maulis and the draxon, the karbis and the proagogos, the mastropos, the prokyklis and the nymphagogos and the pornoboscos. Romans had their own counterparts: the professional procurer, the leno, the mercator meretricius, the admissarius and the institor, the lenonum minister, the perductor and the conductor: and, among the female operatives, the agaga and the stimulatrix, the conciliatrix and the stupri sequestra.

Phallic symbols enter into the Biblical context in I Kings, where Judah is described as building high places and pillars on every high hill. These pillars were actually phallic symbols, in the style of the abominations of the Canaanite cults.

In antiquity, in Biblical and post-Biblical times, the woman, in the widest sense, was the amatory slave of man. But with the woman’s increase of knowledge in erotic skills and practices, in the secrets of her potent physiological attractions, in the use of unguents and cosmetics, potions and concoctions, in corporeal and mechanistic allurements and seductions, the woman’s status gradually rose and extended and became all-embracing. Slowly, by virtue of these very artifices and techniques, by means of gyrations and gestures, provocative dances and tantalizing dress, silent invitations and ocular speech, she began to dominate man, to render him subservient and even obsequious, to control his habits and inclinations and tendencies in social and political directions: until woman, reaching the apogee of her power, based primarily on her erotic compulsiveness, became the woman behind the throne. She had attained her highest end, her ultimate destiny, as the implicit director of human activities. She usurped man’s status, and assumed the regal baton. She manipulated kings and sultans, and her endearments were bought at the price of nations. She decided the fate of empires by her mere brusque whims, or personal resentment, her unpredictable likes. Man exchanged realms and justice for her amatory acquiescence, her erotic beneficence.

In a formal religious-ceremonial sense, antiquity acknowledged participation of women in the sacred temples. In Asia Minor, in the cults of Baal-Peor, in the Egyptian cults of Isis and Osiris, in the Mediterranean Hellenic islands where the cult of Aphrodite in various forms and of analogous deities of passion and lust and procreation was prevalent, in the case of the Vestal guardians of the Roman state religion, priestesses took part in the hieratic rituals, in festive ceremonials, in sacrificial and processional rites.

Even with the advent of Christianity the Greek church in the East had its female votaries, while deaconesses were normally attached to the Church in the West. In the course of time, however, this acquiescence in a female priesthood turned into resentment, into hate, and finally into bitter and continuous official condemnation. Woman became the evil daemon, the essence of every malefic, licentious, forbidden, obscene practice, the sink of turpitude, the scourge of men, the destruction of humanity. Thus many early Fathers of the Church, Tertullian and Arnobius and Clement of Alexandria, inveigh against the serpentine machinations of woman. Hence this view and these attitudes were transmitted into the Middle Ages. In these middle centuries woman is depicted as the ally of Satanic forces, powerful on account of her very femininity, her presumed innocent frailty. She is essentially guileful and treacherous, amoral and immoral, and bent on the spiritual subjugation and desecration of perplexed man. Woman became the symbol of all sin, the prototype of every sacrilegious concept. She was stripped of a soul. She was in league with the demoniac tenebrous forces, the Satanic legions that furtively and thaumaturgically work their evil spells on man. She became, in short, the Anti-Christ incarnate, the Abominable Witch, consort of horned and hoofed Satan. And her attractions, her feminine beauty, were merely distorted and insidious forms of her fundamental iniquities.

Woman was conceived as attaining her sanguinary or lustful purposes by means of feminine stratagems or conspiratorial schemes, by personal ruthlessness that swept aside all frustrations, all moralities, and stopped neither at poisoning nor at murder. The roster of such women, in the stream of universal history, is long and challenging. It includes, among many others equally notorious, equally branded, Lilith and Cleopatra, Claudia and Messalina, Antonina and Theodora, Catherine of Russia and Elizabeth Bathory, Madame de Montespan and Lady Kyteler, the Borgias and Isobel Gowdie, Jeannette Biscar: and, in goetic contexts, Sagana, Canidia, and Oenothea.

Aphrodite had many forms, multiple aspects of her functions and her patronage, numberless descriptive designations, both in Greece itself and in the cults of Asia Minor where her attributes were equated with the properties of analogous and indigenous divinities. But basically she was one, the universal, the cosmic force that dominates all amatory contacts, that drives men, intent votaries of the goddess and bent on adherent dedication to her offices, to the realization of her injunctions at all costs, resorting to charms and mystic recipes, to fantastic interpretations of precious stones and flowers, to talismans and amatory manuals, grimoires, exotic herbs and insidious preparations.

For centuries man and woman have displayed mutual hostilities and resentments in a number of directions: personally and socially, politically and spiritually. Yet there appears a strange dichotomy in this human pair of male and female. They have despised each other and have sought each other, as Plato suggests in one of his more fanciful moments. The mutual act of racial procreation merged and was subsequently largely lost in the erotic consummations itself. So that, as the complexities of life grew, and as its manifestations multiplied and offered man a variety of experiences, motifs, recreational facilities and diversions, the woman as such came into her own, and Aphrodite established her sacred and profane sanctuaries at the crossroads, in sundered islands of the Aegean Sea, on the highways, in luxurious retreats, and in rural fastnesses. And, casting aside all spiritualities in man’s search for a teleological significance to existence, made Eros the alpha and omega, the final purpose, of cosmic being.

Initiation into the cult of Aphrodite was known by the Greek expression mysterion: the mystery. The participants, the mystai, after bathing in the sea—and the sea itself was symbolic, for it was the source of Aphrodite’s own birth—, they assembled in the evening in the Mystery Hall. Torches were lit, casting flitting shadows and tenebrous shapes through the chamber.

Then the ritual began. There were recitals by the initiates. Sacred objects were shown to the awed gathering, as well as certain phenomena about which too little knowledge has been transmitted. Then some kinds of performances were presented, all associated with the portentous relation between mortals, striving toward passionate intimacy with the divinity, and the puissant deity herself.

Three degrees of initiation were in force: the first initiate approach: the preliminary stage: and the highest rites. This final ritual, it is believed, brought into communion the adept and the deity. Erotic and sexual symbols were dominant factors in this ceremonial.

In this mystic cult of the goddess, the hierodule, the courtesan, is the intermediary between the suppliant and the divinity. She is the sexual passport, so to speak, that leads to the more secretive ritual of the Aphroditic temple.

There is, in the course of this rite, the necessity for a purgation, a purification by water. There is a reference to such an initiation in the Roman poet Juvenal’s second satire. He speaks of a mystic sect called the Baptae. This expression derives from the Greek baptizo, dipping in water. The Baptae drank, as an element in their ritual, powerful liquids from phallus-shaped vessels. These Baptae were devotees of Cotytto, an obscene and salacious goddess.

Women were not admitted to the Aphroditic rites: but, strangely, the men came robed as women, painted and powdered and reeking in exotic perfumes. Subsequently, they dedicated themselves to every form of sexual subtlety.

In another more advanced stage of initiation, where physical love became sublimated, Aphrodite was in this phase the Syrian goddess Derceto or Atargatis: the half woman, half fish deity. Basically she was a fertility goddess, sometimes called Dea Syria, the Syrian goddess, the universal divinity. Her cult is described by the Greek writer Lucian: and Apuleius, the Roman philosopher and novelist, speaks about her priests, the wandering Galli:

How the Priests of the Goddesse Siria Were Taken and Put in Prison.

After that we had tarried there a few dayes at the cost and charges of the whole Village, and had gotten much mony by our divination and prognostication of things to come: The priests of the goddesse Siria invented a new meanes to picke mens purses, for they had certaine lofts, whereon were written: Coniuncti terram proscindunt boves ut in futurum laeta germinent sata: that is to say. The Oxen tied and yoked together, doe till the ground to the intent it may bring forth his increase: and by these kind of lottes they deceive many of the simple sort, for if one had demanded whether he should have a good wife or no, they would say that his lot did testifie the same, that he should be tyed and yoked to a good woman and have increase of children. If one demanded whether he should buy lands and possession, they said that he should have much ground that should yeeld his increase. If one demanded whether he should have a good and prosperous voyage, they said he should have good successe, and it should be for the increase of his profit. If one demanded whether hee should vanquish his enemies, and prevaile in pursuite of theeves, they said that this enemy should be tyed and yoked to him: and his pursuite after theeves should be prosperous. Thus by the telling of fortunes, they gathered a great quantity of money, but when they were weary with giving of answers, they drave me away before them next night, through a lane which was more dangerous and stony then the way which we went the night before, for on the one side were quagmires and foggy marshes, on the other side were falling trenches and ditches, whereby my legges failed me, in such sort that I could scarce come to the plaine field pathes. And behold by and by a great company of inhabitants of the towne armed with weapons and on horseback overtooke us, and incontinently arresting Philebus and his Priests, tied them by the necks and beate them cruelly, calling them theeves and robbers, and after they had manacled their hands: Shew us (quoth they) the cup of gold, which (under the colour of your solemne religion) ye have taken away, and now ye thinke to escape in the night without punishment for your fact. By and by one came towards me, and thrusting his hand into the bosome of the goddesse Siria, brought out the cup which they had stole. Howbeit for all they appeared evident and plaine they would not be confounded nor abashed, but jesting and laughing out the matter, gan say: Is it reason masters that you should thus rigorously intreat us, and threaten for a small trifling cup, which the mother of the Goddesse determined to give to her sister for a present? Howbeit for all their lyes and cavellations, they were carryed back unto the towne, and put in prison by the Inhabitants, who taking the cup of gold, and the goddesse which I bare, did put and consecrate them amongst the treasure of the temple.

Aphrodite exacted from her devotees certain prescribed ceremonies, testimonies to their communion with the goddess, palpable evidences of their total mystic and spiritual absorption in the sacraments she demanded of her votaries.

The ritual followed an established design. At sunset the catechumen is conducted to the temple. Then, facing the East, the priest raises his left hand skyward and with his right he seizes a bronze knife, plunges it into boiling water, and then performs the ritual sexual rite with respect to the catechumen.

Then followed solemn and hieratic instruction in the amatory procedures, including the methods of arousing erotic sensibilities, provocative postures and gestures, words and formulas, osculation and its pervasive corporeal significance. There were, furthermore, illustrative consummations, considered without lewdness, but accepted as formal elements in the grave cosmic scheme. There was a musical accompaniment that softly intertwined in the sequence of the various rituals and presentations, a kind of amatory, seductive litany, enfolding the entire ceremonial in a sacred aura of mysticism. In the concluding phase of these rites, there appeared the phallic procession, the symbolic glorification of the creative urge, and the actual illustration of this potency culminated in an abandoned sexual orgy, indiscriminate and incestuous, exultant and fleshly, carnal and spiritual in one fervid syncretism. A concomitant of this vast sensual exhibition, this release of the physical carapace, was prostitution itself, which for long retained a ritualistic character.

The next step in this genesiac process was sacred prostitution, whereby the woman symbolized the solemnity and the compulsiveness of the Aphroditic cult, while the man was the visitant, a suppliant for the favor of the divinity. And the hierodule thus was a kind of prototype, associated with wise skills, a vestal of the goddess, initiating men into secret amatory and sacred rituals: an adept too in concocting love philtres to further genesiac exultation, to induce total participation in a sort of Aphroditic gnosticism.

The Aphroditic injunction embraced, in a sense, the entire cosmos. It involved primarily self-love, love of being, awareness of the significant entity, the ego itself, marked by dignity, by esteem. Then followed the love of the social milieu of which one formed part, and of the impulse to maintain its equilibrium by contributing one’s own efforts, one’s personal function, to the totality of the social frame. Lastly, there was a kind of all-embracing, comprehensive cosmic love, directed to a synthesis of corporeal love that mystically rose to a sublimated spiritual-amatory zone.

In the mystic cults, it was postulated that the amatory embrace partakes of both a human and a cosmic form of attraction, and becomes, in a sublimated degree, an act of prayer, an erotic supplication.

The priapic cult was the male counterpart of the Aphroditic cult. Just as the hierodule was the official priestess of the goddess, mentor in the feminine erotic and reverential mysteries, so the priapic cult had for its primary objective the exaltation of the male generative principle. In remote antiquity, and particularly in Egyptian mysticism, the phallus was the representative symbol of Osiris, the ultimate creative potency. Gradually, in the course of the centuries, the phallic symbol acquired a pejorative and degrading and exclusively and narrowly functional nature associated with the mere physical act. And Priapus, equated at one time with Osiris, degenerated into a secondary and minor figure, a mere rustic threat. Yet Priapus retained some semblance of his former repute. He still had his temple and his priestly ministrants. He still received favors and offerings. He still made promises to his devotees and listened to their urgent amatory pleas. He still maintained his sexual rituals, however much they had lost their spiritual and cosmic values. He still presided, in the actuality of performance, over marriage initiations, over nuptial consummations. But with time he disappeared as a member of the mystery cults. And only in vestiges of legend, in old rites transmitted into the Middle Ages, in sculptural presentations, in phallic symbolisms, did his former magnificence and his primary rank retain any fragmentary reminiscence of his vanished glories.

In the smaller towns of Italy festive occasions in honor of Priapus were perpetuated until far into the Middle Ages; and Priapus, in some instances, particularly in Brittany, in Belgium, and in France, merged with Christian saints, who appropriated, in their turn, the genesiac properties of their prototype.

In rural districts, shrines dedicated to Priapus defied the spread of Christianity, while phallic forms, in marble and stone, adorned public buildings, baths, columns, churches. Priapus, to some extent, thus went underground. He became a furtive and then an obsolescent and forgotten figure: but in Switzerland and in Sweden, in Provence and in Germany, Priapus clung tenaciously, if only in an etymological sense. For Friday, Friga’s day, is merely a Teutonic or Anglo-Saxon form of the Day of Priapus.

Strange how the antique charms and periapts, the old Roman fascina, were still suspended from the necks of children and women: often without any awareness of the actual significance of the talisman, but just as frequently, until late into the fourteenth century at least, ecclesiastical ordinances and prohibitions made it evident that there was official knowledge of the priapic survival.

Among the ancient Chaldeans, Assyrians, and Babylonians, the erotic cult was dedicated to the fertility deities Ishtar and Bel and Sin. Ishtar was the Mesopotamian Aphrodite: a goddess of love and at the same time a warrior deity. Bel is Baal-Peor, the phallic deity, while Sin is the moon divinity.

Aphrodite, as a universal goddess, with universal erotic functions that embrace all humanity, all elements of the cosmos, appears in different regions and centuries under a variety of names. She is Aphrodite Callipygos and she is Aphrodite Anosia: Aphrodite Peribaso and Aphrodite Anadyomene and Aphrodite Hetaira. Sometimes she is designated with reference to her beauty, or to her amatory functions, or to her epichorial association with temple worship dedicated to her person, or to the suppliants whom she intimately protects. She is thus Aphrodite Pandemos and Aphrodite Porne. She is Aphrodite Trymalitis and Aphrodite Stratonikis. She is Aphrodite Pontia and Aphrodite Urania.

Then she becomes, retaining her essential character but merely transferring her rituals, Venus Fisica and Venus Caelesiis and Venus Erycian. She is the Cytherean and the Paphian, she is the Cyprian divinity.

She is known, again, as Anaïtis and as Astoreth. She is Allat and Argimpasa and Atargatis. In later ages she is Milda in Eastern Europe and Merta and Freya in the North.

But under whatever designation she appears, in Arabia or Scythia, in the Greek Islands or in Carthage, she is fertility incarnate and love. She is the alma Venus genetrix that the Roman poet Lucretius reverently invokes.

Through the ages the concept of generation has undergone progressively definitive changes. In proto-historical times, when legend and myth, mingling with supernatural fantasies, conceived imaginative unrealities in relation to the medical and physiological facts, the ancient Hindu epics assumed man as sprung from the forests, from aspen and ash trees, sylvan creatures, in some sense, corresponding to the half-human form of the ancient Hellenic satyrs. In some regions of India there was a belief that the produce of certain trees was human beings, male and female, and that the mortals fell upon the earth like ripe fruit. Among the Persians and contiguous races of antiquity, pregnant women were given soma juice to drink, to ensure handsome children. Soma is an intoxicating brew that is often mentioned in Vedic religious rituals. According to Pliny the Elder’s testimony, water in which mistletoe has been steeped encourages procreation in women and animals.

The oak tree and the chestnut also have been reputed to aid in procreation. So with plants too, that have at all times been treated as potential and actual amatory aids. An African legend makes a girl, after drinking the juice of a certain plant, give birth to a mighty warrior.

The chewing of lilies was considered conducive to fertility, in medieval folklore. So, in still earlier times, with the pomegranate and the almond. In many cases, the belief arose from the similarity of the plant or flower or herb, in certain respects, to the genitalia or the pudenda. This was so in the case of the bean. So with mandrake, and cress, and certain species of berries.

Another legendary mode of conception, prevalent in ancient classical and Oriental mythology, was theriomorphic theogamy: that is, generation by a divinity who assumes animal form.

Instances are multiple. Zeus, in the shape of a bull, pursues Europa in cow form. In Egypt, Apis the bull has a similar function. The seductive serpent, again, is Zeus once more, exercising his protean capacity. On occasion, he becomes a swan, and associates with Leda. Or he becomes a variety of creatures: an ant, or a dove, or a goat, or an ass. Once, Neptune, for a similar purpose, turned into a ram.

Sometimes, also, the divine serpent, sinuous and wily and knowledgeable, is actually devoured by the woman, as in Arab regions.

Not only animals and plants were associated with generative capacities, but natural phenomena as well: the winds and storms, hail and the sun and the rain. Some primitive tribes attributed their origin to snow: some to lightning, or to thunder, to the rainbow, to clouds, to the morning star. A warm breeze, or a cyclone might equally well have been their source. Greek, Roman, and Chinese myths contain numberless illustrations of astral or phenomenal association with mortal generation.

There is a wry anecdote on this phase in Flavius Josephus, the historian. An ingenious suitor performs the function of the deity Anubis with complete faithful acceptance.

This type of mortal substitution in place of the divinity was common in the priestly rituals of Egypt, and was not unknown in Asia Minor, in India, and in China.

Periapts or talismans as an erotic provocation were anciently devised in phallic form. They were carried on the person, by both men and women, or were used to decorate temples and shrines and public buildings.

In later ages, amatory talismans assumed a great variety of forms, in the shape of rings, necklaces, plaques engraved with formulas or astrological figures and signs of the Zodiac or possibly a bull, a dove, a number or a series of mystic numbers. A piece of parchment might be inscribed with names, or the alphabetical sign of Venus. Precious stones were talismans, each possessing an esoteric virtue or property according to color or substance. A periapt might be set in some strategic spot: buried underground, placed under a pillow: or even ground into a powder.

The all-powerful goddess herself, Venus, had her own minerals. Copper, associated with the love goddess, was known to the Greeks as aphrodon. Tin also was of Aphroditic significance: while sulphur springs were also, in a legendary sense, related to Venus.

It has even been credited that floral nomenclature contains amatory significance, and that certain plants have their erotic symbolisms.

Flowers in antiquity as well as in modern times had their erotic implications. To the Greeks and Romans, the essence of areté, of beauty and perfection, was the rose, while the Egyptians too revered the rose as the prototype of perfection.

To Aphrodite were consecrated the mistletoe and myrtle, the lily, satyrion, the iris, celandine, sengreen, mallow, and verbena.

CHAPTER II
GREEK

Plato

Plato (c. 429–347 B.C.), the Greek philosopher who developed his metaphysical and cosmological theories through a series of some twenty-five dialogues and the Apology, has a great deal to say on the erotic theme.

In the Timaeus, he says of sexual excess:

He who has the seed about the spinal marrow too plentiful and overflowing, like a tree overladen with fruit, has many throes, and also obtains many pleasures in his desires and their offspring, and is for the most part of his life deranged because his pleasures and pains are so very great; his soul is rendered foolish and disordered by his body; yet he is regarded not as one diseased, but as one who is voluntarily bad, which is a mistake. The truth is that sexual intemperance is a disease of the soul due chiefly to the moisture and fluidity which is produced in one of the elements by the loose consistency of the bones. And in general, all that which is termed the incontinence of pleasure and is deemed a reproach under the idea that the wicked voluntarily do wrong is not justly a matter for reproach. For no man is voluntarily bad, but the bad become bad by reason of an ill disposition of the body and bad education—things which are hateful to every man and happen to him against his will.

Again, of sexual love, Plato says, in the Timaeus:

On the subject of animals, then, the following remarks may be offered. Of the men who came into the world, those who were cowards or led unrighteous lives may with reason be supposed to have changed into the nature of women in the second generation. And this was the reason why at that time the gods created in us the desire of sexual intercourse, contriving in man one animated substance, and in woman another, which they formed, respectively, in the following manner. The outlet for drink by which liquids pass through the lung under the kidneys and into the bladder, which receives and then by the pressure of the air emits them, was so fashioned by them as to penetrate also into the body of the marrow, which passes from the head along the neck and through the back, and which in the preceding discourse we have named the seed. And the seed, having life and becoming endowed with respiration, produces in that part in which it respires a lively desire of emission, and thus creates in us the love of procreation. Wherefore also in men the organ of generation becoming rebellious and masterful, like an animal disobedient to reason, and maddened with the sting of lust, seeks to gain absolute sway, and the same is the case with the so-called womb or matrix of women. The animal within them is desirous of procreating children, and when remaining unfruitful long beyond its proper time, gets discontented and angry, and wandering in every direction through the body, closes up the passages of the breath, and, by obstructing respiration, drives them to extremity, causing all varieties of disease, until at length the desire and love of the man and the woman, bringing them together and as it were plucking the fruit from the tree, sow in the womb, as in a field, animals unseen by reason of their smallness and without form; these again are separated and matured within; they are then finally brought out into the light, and thus the generation of animals is completed.

In the Symposium, Plato postulates a philosophy of love:

Love is the love of beauty and not of deformity?

He assented.

And the admission has been already made that love is of that

which a man wants and has not?

True, he said.

Then love wants and has not beauty?

Certainly, he replied.

And would you call that beautiful which wants and does not possess beauty?

Certainly not.

Then would you still say that love is beautiful?

Agathon replied: I fear that I did not understand what I was saying.

Nay, Agathon, replied Socrates; but I should like to

ask you one more question:—is not the good also the

beautiful?

Yes.

Then in wanting the beautiful love wants also the

good? I can not refute you, Socrates, said Agathon.

And let us suppose that what you say is true.

Say rather, dear Agathon, that you can not refute the

truth; for Socrates is easily refuted.

And now I will take my leave of you, and rehearse the tale of love which I heard once upon a time from Diotima of Mantineia, who was a wise woman in this and many other branches of knowledge. She was the same who deferred the plague of Athens ten years by a sacrifice, and was my instructress in the art of love. In the attempt which I am about to make I shall pursue Agathon’s method, and begin with his admissions, which are nearly if not quite the same which I made to the wise woman when she questioned me: this will be the easiest way, and I shall take both parts myself as well as I can. For, like Agathon, she spoke first of the being and nature of love, and then of his works. And I said to her in nearly the same words which he

“As in the former instance, he is neither mortal fair; and she proved to me as I proved to him that, in my way of speaking about him, love was neither fair nor good. “What do you mean, Diotima,” I said, “is love then evil and foul?”

“Hush,” she cried; “is that to be deemed foul which is not fair?”

“Certainly,” I said.

“And is that which is not wise, ignorant? do you not see that there is a mean between wisdom and ignorance?”

“And what is this?” I said.

“Right opinion,” she replied; “which, as you know, being incapable of giving a reason, is not knowledge (for how could knowledge be devoid of reason? nor again, ignorance, for neither can ignorance attain the truth), but is clearly something which is a mean between ignorance and wisdom.”

“Quite true,” I replied.

“Do not then insist,” she said, “that what is not fair is of necessity foul, or what is not good evil; or infer that because love is not fair and good he is therefore foul and evil; for he is in a mean between them.”

“Well,” I said, “love is surely admitted by all to be a great god.”

“By those who know or by those who don’t know?”

“By all.”

“And how, Socrates,” she said with a smile, “can love be acknowledged to be a great god by those who say that he is not a god at all?”

“And who are they?” I said.

“You and I are two of them,” she replied.

“How can that be?” I said.

“That is very intelligible,” she replied; “as you yourself would acknowledge that the gods are happy and fair—of course you would—would you dare to say that any god was not?”

“Certainly not,” I replied.

“And you mean by the happy, those who are the possessors of things good and fair?”

“Yes.”

“And you admitted that love, because he was in want, desires those good and fair things of which he is in want?”

“Yes, I admitted that.”

“But how can he be a god who has no share in the good or the fair?”

“That is not to be supposed.”

“Then you see that you also deny the deity of love.”

“What then is love?” I asked; “Is he mortal?”

“No.”

“What then?”

“As in the former instance, he is neither mortal nor immortal, but in a mean between them.”

“What is he then, Diotima?”

“He is a great spirit, and like all that is spiritual he is intermediate between the divine and the mortal.”

“And what is the nature of this spiritual power?” I said.

“This is the power,” she said, “which interprets and conveys to the gods the prayers and sacrifices of men, and to men the commands and rewards of the gods; and this power spans the chasm which divides them, and in this all is bound together, and through this the arts of the prophet and the priest, their sacrifices and mysteries and charms, and all prophecy and incantation, find their way. For God mingles not with man; and through this power all the intercourse and speech of God with man, whether awake or asleep, is carried on. The wisdom which understands this is spiritual; all other wisdom, such as that of arts or handicrafts, is mean and vulgar. Now these spirits or intermediate powers are many and divine, and one of them is love.”

“And who,” I said, “was his father and who his mother?”

“The tale,” she said, “will take time; nevertheless I will tell you. On the birthday of Aphrodite there was a feast of the gods, at which the god Poros or Plenty, who is the son of Metis or Discretion, was one of the guests. When the feast was over, Penia or Poverty, as the manner was, came about the doors to beg. Now Plenty, who was the worse for nectar (there was no wine in those days), came into the garden of Zeus and fell into a heavy sleep; and Poverty considering her own straitened circumstances, plotted to have him for a husband, and accordingly she lay down at his side and conceived love, who partly because he is naturally a lover of the beautiful, and because Aphrodite is herself beautiful, and also because he was born on Aphrodite’s birthday is her follower and attendant.”

(B. Jowett)

In Book 8 of The Laws, too, Plato discusses a variety of subjects, among them festivals and contests in which men and women meet together. This topic introduces the question of the sexes, and Plato makes definitive statements in this respect. Licentiousness, he declares, is abominable. Men ought to live under controlled moderation. That is what nature herself enjoins. Man otherwise would fall below the level of beasts. Here the laws should be restrictive. But if that is not possible, there must at least be some adherence to decent mores.

Lust and desire are discussed in Book 6 of The Laws and in the Greater Hippias. The three universal appetites are food, drink, and lust of procreation, which is linked with the imperious sexual frenzy and its concomitant excitements. Sexual desire, the necessities of love, overflowing into excesses, may be harmful to the welfare of the state. Excesses must therefore be stemmed and controlled by laws. In this manner evil may be diminished and the good of the state as a whole will be promoted.

With regard to exhausted capacity and the loss of passion as a corollary to old age, Plato says, in Book I of The Republic:

I will tell you, Socrates, he said, what my own feeling is. Men of my age flock together; we are birds of a feather, as the old proverb says; and at our meetings the tale of my acquaintance commonly is—I can not eat, I can not drink; the pleasures of youth and love are fled away; there was a good time once, but now that is gone, and life is no longer life. Some complain of the slights which are put upon them by relations, and they will tell you sadly of how many evils their old age is the cause. But to me, Socrates, these complainers seem to blame that which is not really at fault. For if old age were the cause, I too being old, and every other old man, would have felt as they do. But this is not my own experience, nor that of others whom I have known. How well I remember the aged poet Sophocles, when in answer to the question, How does love suit with age, Sophocles,—are you still the man you were? Peace, he replied; most gladly have I escaped from a mad and furious master. His words have often occurred to my mind since, and they seem as good to me now as at the time when he uttered them. For certainly old age has a great sense of calm and freedom; when the passions relax their hold, then, as Sophocles says, we are freed from the grasp not of one mad master only, but of many. The truth is, Socrates, that these regrets, and also the complaints about relations, are to be attributed to the same cause, which is not old age, but men’s characters and tempers; for he who is of a calm and happy nature will hardly feel the pressure of age, but to him who is of an opposite disposition youth and age are equally a burden.

Of sexual appetite Plato declares, in Book 8 of The Republic:

Are not necessary pleasures those of which we can not get rid, and of which the satisfaction is a benefit to us? And they are rightly called so, because we are framed by nature to desire both what is beneficial and what is necessary, and can not help it.

True.

We are not wrong therefore in calling them necessary?

We are not.

And the desires of which a man may get rid, if he takes pains from his youth upwards—of which the presence, moreover, does no good, and in some cases the reverse of good—shall we not be right in saying that all these are unnecessary?

Yes, certainly.

Suppose we select an example of either kind, in order that we may have a general notion of them?

Very good.

Will not the desire of eating, that is, of simple food and condiments, in so far as they are required for health and strength, be of the necessary class?

That is what I should suppose.

The pleasure of eating is necessary in two ways; it does us good and it is essential to the continuance of life?

Yes.

But the condiments are only necessary in so far as they are good for health?

Certainly.

And the desire which goes beyond this, of more delicate food, or other luxuries, which might generally be got rid of, if controlled and trained in youth, and is hurtful to the body, and hurtful to the soul in the pursuit of wisdom and virtue, may be rightly called unnecessary?

Very true.

May we not say that these desires spend, and that the others make money because they conduce to production?

Certainly.

And of the pleasures of love, and all other pleasures, the same holds good?

True.

And the drone of whom we spoke was he who was surfeited in pleasures and desires of this sort, and was the slave of the unnecessary desires, whereas he who was subject to the necessary only was miserly and oligarchical?

Very true.

(B. Jowett)

Nakedness, both of boys and girls, was not an obscenity in ancient Greece. The statesman Lycurgus, for example, established exercises in Sparta in which boys and girls, in puris naturalibus, took part.

To the Greek philosopher Plato, too, nudity involved no indecency. He actually advocated, in The Laws, naked dances by boys and girls, for the purpose of mutual acquaintance.

Dioscorides

Pedanius Dioscorides, who flourished in the first century A.D., was born in Anazarbus. He became an army physician: but, in addition, he was deeply interested and versed in pharmacological subjects. With the purpose of compiling a kind of encyclopedic work in this field, Dioscorides traveled widely throughout Greece, Asia Minor, and the Mediterranean countries, collecting information, legends, and prescriptions.

Dioscorides is the author of a systematic Materia Medica, written with clarity and precision and with an informative rather than a stylistic purpose. His work includes plants and herbs, animals, minerals: all arranged in exact subdivisions, and emphasizing the medicinal and pharmacological virtues of all the items included. The text is arranged in five books, and covers some thousand drugs. An English translation, under the title of the Greek Herbal of Dioscorides, was produced by John Goodyer in 1655, and was edited by Robert T. Gunther and first printed by the Oxford University Press in 1934.

Apart from the fascination of the work in itself, Dioscorides lists a number of herbs and roots that are of amatory interest as philtres. Goodyer’s text, for the relevant items, follows:

Greek Cyclamen: It is sayd also that the root is taken amongst love-procuring medicines being beaten, and soe made into Trochiscks. Trochiscks are pastilles.

Brassica Rapa: Turnip: Also called Gongule. The Romans call it Rapum. The roote of it being sod is nourishing, yet very windie, and breeding moist and loose flesh, and provoking to Venerie.

(As an infusion) being dranck it is good against deadly medicines, and doth provoke to Venerie.

Kuprinon: Oil of Cuperos. An invigorating oil.

Lolium Temulentum: Darnel: Being suffumigated with polenta, or Myrrh, or Saffron, or Franckincense, it doth help conceptions.

Cardamom Lepidium Sativum: Cress: Some call it Cynocardamom. The best is found in Babylon. The seed is effectual in inciting to copulation.

Orchis Rubra: Orchis Papilionacea: And of this root it is said that if the greater roote is eaten by men, it makes them beget males, and the lesser, being eaten by women, to conceive females. It is further storied that ye women in Thessalia do give to drink with goates milk ye tenderer root to provoke Venerie, and the dry root for ye suppressing, dissolving of Venerie. And that it being drank ye one is dissolved by the other.

Satyrion: Also called Trifolium, because ‘it bears leaves in three’s, as it were,’ bending down to ye earth like to Rumex or Lilium, yet lesser, and reddish. But a naked stalk, long, as of a cubit, a flower like a Lilly, white; a bulbous root, as bigg as an apple, redd, but within white, like an egg, to ye taster sweet and pleasant to ye mouth. This one ought to drink in black hard wine for ye Opisthotonon, and use it, if he will lie with a woman. For they say that this also doth stirr up courage in ye conjunction.

Saturion Eruthronion: Called by the Romans Morticulum Veneris. It hath a seed like to flax seed. It is said that it doth stirr up conjunctions, like ye Scincus doth. It is storied that the root being taken into ye hand doth provoke to Venerie, but much more, being drank with wine.

Salvia Horminum: The Romans call it Geminales. It is an herb like to Marrubium. In the wild it is found round swart, but in the other somewhat long, and black, of which there is use, and this also is thought being drank with wine to provoke conjunction.

Galium Verum: Gallion. But ye root doth provoke to conjunction.

Katananke: The Romans call it Herba Filicula. The roots are of two kinds. ‘But some report that both kinds are good for Philters, and they say that the Thessalian women do use them.’

Phuteuma: Also called Silene spurium. Phuteuma hath leaves like to Radicula, but smaller, much seed, bored through, little root, thin, close to the earth, which some relate to be good for a love medicine.

Nonnus

Nonnus was a Greek epic poet of Panopolis, in Egypt. He flourished in the fifth century A.D., and is the author of Dionysiaca. This is a long epic poem describing, in abundant detail, with picturesque imagery, the triumphal progression of Dionysus, god of wine and fertility, to India.

The poem is packed with quaint geographical lore, with a miscellaneous mass of information on astrology and plants and other subjects intertwined into the primary theme, and it also contains many erotic incidents of a mythological nature.

The Corybantes take a prominent place in the worship of Dionysus. They are the frantic, orgiastic priests of Cybele, the Mighty Mother of the Gods, and their passionate ceremonials touch the erotic field.

The handsome, effeminate Cadmus appears—the cheeks of his love-begetting face are red as roses, chants the poet: and the sight of Cadmus is itself an amatory urge.

It is effective, too, in the case of Harmonia, destined to be Cadmus’ mate. Aphrodite addresses the prospective bride:

I will teach those grace-breathing kisses to women unhappy in love.

There was, evidently, knowledge of potions and similar excitants, for one character pleads:

Tell me what varied store of balsams can I apply in my heart to cure the wound of love.

And again:

I shrink before a woman, for she shoots bright shafts from her lovesmit countenance and pierces me with her beauty.

In the sixth century A.D., Theodora, a public courtesan whose name was a byword in Byzantium, became first the mistress and then the wife of the Roman Emperor Justinian. Even as an Empress she did not abandon her profligate ways. She had experienced and invited every possible variety of erotic practice. She went out with bands of youths and spent the night in their riotous company. Her erotic frenzies drove her to public exhibitionism. Often she had appeared in the theatre in puris naturalibus. Yet her personal beauty made the Emperor her blind slave, while her lusts extended in every direction.

The Greek chronicler Procopius describes the court of the Roman Emperor Justinian and his consort Theodora. The Imperial general attached to the court was Belisarius. He had a wife, named Antonina, who was so passionate that she consummated her erotic impulses, in relation to a youth named Theodosius, in the full presence of her servants and attendant maids.

The Byzantine general Belisarius, attached to the court of the Emperor Justinian, in the sixth century A.D., was again and again the victim of his wife’s flagrant infidelities. Again and again, however, he forgave her. He permitted himself self-deception, in spite, at times, of the evidence of his own eyes. He was so deeply infatuated with her that he preferred to retain her at all costs.

The Greek orator Demosthenes, in one of his famous legal speeches, successfully pleaded for the death penalty in the case of one of the mistresses of the dramatist Sophocles. She was associated with a secret club, and was initiated in the preparation of philtres and magic potions.

Among the Greeks, the concept of love in the modern sense was rare. Nor was the medieval attitude to amatory sensibilities, embodied in courtly love, any more prevalent. Love, in a general sense, was treated as an aberration from normal life, a kind of sickness, a lack of balance in the elements of the entity. Yet there was, of course, as the Greek Anthology and other poetic testimony indicate, lust and passion and erotic intimacy. There was, too, a greater freedom in this relationship between men and public women, nor did this association affect in a negative sense the marriage relationship.

There were these professional public hetairae, female companions who often had marked intellectual endowments, whose association with poets and dramatists, statesmen and philosophers brought not the slightest stigma on such men in their artistic or public career. Aspasia of Miletus was one of the most outstanding of this group. She was the mistress of the statesman Pericles. Gnathaena and Lais were equally known. It was said that Plato was in love with the hetaira Archeanassa of Colophon. The comic poet Menander was associated with Glycera. Phryne, the priestess of Aphrodite, as she was termed, was the most beautiful of them all, the model for the sculptor Praxiteles’ Aphrodite.

The seductive equipment of the hetaira was as various as in modern times, and as effective. It included diaphanous robes, of Coan silk, veils and scarves, mirrors and unguents and rouge, jewelry for neck and ears and arms. And the hetaira replenished her armory and refurbished her memory of her techniques: for there were at hand, for her constant use, manuals that contained guidance, amatory and financial and social, specific instructions in a multiplicity of hypothetical but more than probable cases, and ominous warnings as well.

CHAPTER III
ROMANS

In the first century B.C. the licentiousness of the Roman matron was already a subject for grim condemnation. Horace, who was virtually the Poet Laureate of the Augustan Age, laments the degeneration of morality. The temples are abandoned, he bewails, and lie in ruins. The sacred marriage vows are broken. The uprightness of the old domestic life is gone. Our own generation is plunging headlong into destruction. Against the women in particular he inveighs as follows:

The matron, when bidden, arises and goes forth publicly, not without the knowledge of her husband, whether some pedlar invites her, or the captain of a Spanish sailing vessel, who buys her shame at a high price.

A notorious, unsavory district in ancient Rome was known as the Subura. It was a valley lying between the Esquiline and the Viminal Hills of the city. This area was clamorous with brothels, with the dregs of Romans, foreigners, slavers, pimps, and harlots. Loads of marble passed through the narrow alleys. The lanes were cluttered with mules, dogs, goats, and sheep.

There were also shops of various kinds, practically nothing but openings in the wall spaces, where provisions were sold and various delicacies. Barbers and tailors plied their occupations, while minor trades, according to epigraphical evidence, were also conducted here. Julius Caesar himself resided in the Subura. There was also a Jewish synagogue in this district. The Subura is mentioned frequently in Roman literature, in a derogatory and contemptuous sense, particularly by the poets Juvenal, Persius, and Martial.

In the Subura all kinds of amatory contrivances, concoctions and aids were offered to an eager clientele: amulets, incantations, spells, philtres, drugs; and a flourishing market in these commodities prevailed, at first furtively and warily: then with more determined and acknowledged public awareness.

The Roman satirist Juvenal, who dates in the first century A.D., mentions potions and philtres used by women; frequently, however, for purposes of torture or poisoning their husbands. Again, describing the immoralities and licentiousness of the frantic Roman matrons of his own days, Juvenal thunders:

From one person she secures magic incantations. From another, she buys Thessalian love-potions to destroy her husband’s mind.

The Roman poet Lucan produced an epic poem entitled Pharsalia. Book 6 contains a vivid, elaborate description of magic scenes and practices. The capacities of the witch are enumerated with a feeling of mounting horror. Her skills come in for horrendous comment: brewing concoctions for malefic purposes: pronouncing incantations that inspire strange passions by virtue of their goetic potency. These spells, the poet awesomely declares, are more effective than even love goblets.

The implication is that love philtres were manifestly in common use for amatory purposes and in common knowledge.

Certain deities were anciently associated with particular sexual practices. Volupia, an old Roman goddess mentioned by St. Augustine, encouraged voluptuous pleasures. Strenia bestowed vigor on the male. Stimula aroused the erotic desires of husbands.

The practice of amatory aids, among the Romans, reached as far as the Imperial court. The Emperor Julian, known as the Apostate, for instance, mentions, in a letter to his friend Callixenes, mandrake as a love agent.

In antiquity, both Greek and Roman, Medea is the arch sorceress, the supreme exemplar of witchcraft, the most powerful adept in the Black Arts of Colchis.

Seneca, the Stoic philosopher and dramatist, who was also the tutor of the Roman Emperor Nero, is the author of a drama entitled Medea, in which he depicts the protagonist herself in frenzied action.

Medea’s nurse appears upon the scene, speaking of her mistress.

She describes Medea gathering potent herbs with her magic sickle, by the light of the moon. Medea sprinkles the herbs with venom extracted from serpents. Into this compound she thrusts the entrails and organs of unclean birds: the heart of the screech owl, vampire’s vitals, torn from the living flesh. Over the entire foul brew she murmurs her magic incantations, concocting her philtres.

In spite of the frenzied commerce in philtres and other means of stimulation, both in ancient and in modern times, Ovid himself, the Roman poet who produced the superlative amatory guides in poetic form, asserts categorically that invocations and formulas, enchantments and sorcery, secretive recipes and exotic philtres are ultimately of no avail in their purpose. Even witches and enchantresses such as Medea and Circe, for all their skill in the goetic arts, could not circumvent man’s own personal perversities, or prevent Jason, for instance, or Ulysses, from amatory unfaithfulness.

In the contest of love, then, concludes the poet, philtres achieve nothing but imbalanced minds, wrecked health, and, sometimes, death itself.

Love philtres were not infrequently fatal in their effects. Such veneficia amatoria were forbidden by imperial decree. But there were furtive ways of circumventing these prohibitions.

Ingredients, apart from their poisonous nature, might be nauseating and repulsive to administer. As an instance, the milk of an ass mixed with the blood of a bat was considered a genesiac encouragement. The ingredients, again, might induce sickness, madness, and even death.

Among known ingredients that went to form the final, putatively effective brew were herbs, organs of birds, insects, blood, and genitalia.

With the ages, the range of ingredients and recipes was extended. In Mediterranean regions old traditional amatory philtres remained in folk use. In other areas, particularly in the South American continent, the natives used concoctions that were often virtual poisons. For they ceaselessly ransacked the forests and jungles for amatory aids.

Among the Romans, the sepia octopus had a wide reputation for its amatory potential. It is mentioned by the Roman comedy writer Plautus. In a scene depicting an exhausted elder, an octopus is bought by him at the market, as a rejuvenating aid.

In his De Re Coquinaria, a cookery book produced by Apicius, a Roman of the first century A.D., there are many recipes for the preparation of gourmet dishes as well as less luxurious fare: fish and game, meats, vegetables, fruit, dessert, cereals.

Among the herbs that Apicius includes as ingredients in stews, roasts, pottages, soups, and sauces, there are many that had and still have reputedly, an amatory reaction, as: cumin and dill, aniseed, bay-berry, celery-seed, capers and caraway, sesame, mustard, shallots, nard, thyme, ginger and musk, wormwood, basil, parsley, origanum, pennyroyal, rocket, safflower, rue-berry, flowers of mallow, rue-seed, lovage, hyssop and garlic and capers.

Many vegetables, too, that are credited with genesiac virtue are included in Apicius’ book, as: artichokes and beans, asparagus, turnips, truffles, parsnips and leeks, beets and bryony, cabbage, chicory, cucumbers, fenugreek, radishes, and lettuce.

Apicius’ culinary directions and preparations include a variety of fish that had, in Rome times and also in later ages, provocative amatory properties. Among such piscatory agents are: Grilled red mullet, young tunny, sea-bream, murena, horse-mackerel, gold-bream. And, among sea food: octopus and mussels, sea-urchin, oysters, cuttlefish, squid, sea-crayfish, electric ray.

In some of the fragments and extant verses of the Roman philosopher Seneca, there are illustrations of the erotic theme. In one poem the partly obliterated verses run:

Love, my darling, and be loved in turn always,

So that at no instant may our mutual love cease ...

From sunrise to sunset,

And may the Evening Star gaze

upon our love

And the Morning Star too.

An instance of abnormal lust also occurs:

Fortunate is she who caresses your neck.

Fortunate is the girl who presses close to you, body

To body,

And crushes her tongue against your soft lips.

Another fragment inveighs against a wealthy, beautiful, noble matron, lustful and incestuous.

In ancient Italy the cult of Liber or Bacchus was so widespread that festivals held in his honor and called Liberalia were continued for an entire month. During this period the phallus, carried in procession exultantly, to the accompaniment of lewd songs, lascivious talk, and obscene gestures, was decked with garlands, while erotic acts in their final consummation were freely performed in public view, as reverential testimony to the potency of the deity so symbolized.

The cult of Bacchus and of his symbol the phallus was introduced among the Romans by the priests of Cybele, the Mighty Mother of the Gods, who were known as Corybantes. Clement of Alexandria, the Church Father, also calls these priests Cabiri.

In the Imperial Age of Rome, a certain distinguished poet, Verginius Rufus, an elderly friend of Pliny the Younger, was known for his erotic poems. These, however, are no longer extant.

In Imperial Rome, the professors of grammar and of rhetoric, two of the basic subjects taught to young Romans, used many Greek and Roman authors in bowdlerized versions. In the case of the lyric poets in particular, the suggestive and erotic elements were minimized or excised.

During the Imperial Age of Rome, writers appeared at intervals who were cumulatively known as scriptores erotici—writers on love themes. Their tales, elaborately expanded and decked out with circumstantial details, were concerned with the amatory adventures of mythological personalities, among them, for instance, Acontius and Cydippe.

The Roman epigrammatist Martial (c. 40 A.D.–c. 104) claimed that, despite his obscene verses, his own personal life was unstained. He produced a large body of epigrams and occasional poems dealing, to a very considerable extent, with erotic and sexual topics: perversions, sodomy and incest, adultery and pederasty. His pieces mention actual contemporary figures, and thus present a realistic and intimate picture of Roman salacious aberrations at all levels of society, as well as the erotic degeneration of the age.

The Emperor Nero, with all his inhuman and vicious traits and bloody crimes, was a versatile poet. He was the author of sportive and also erotic pieces, none of which, however, are now extant.

Among the rites practiced by the Romans with respect to the cult of Priapus, there was the custom of the bride who, seated before the phallic image, made at least a symbolic contact, and most commonly an actual one, with a view to encourage later marital fecundity. It was at the same time an apotropaic measure as well. Married women were included in this ritual, and participated in similar practices. These rites, described in violently condemnatory terms, are mentioned by St. Augustine and Lactantius and Arnobius, who take occasion to point out the Roman pagan abominations in sexual matters.

With respect to the cult of Bacchus, the god himself had in his service women as priestesses. In the fanes dedicated to the phallic god, these priestesses celebrated nocturnal mystic rites. This practice is described in some detail by Petronius, the author of the remarkable Roman picaresque novel entitled the Satyricon:

We had resolv’d to keep out of the broad streets, and accordingly took our walk thro’ that quarter of the city where we were likely to meet least company; when in a narrow winding lane that had not passage thro’, we saw somewhat before us, two comely matron-like women, and followed them at a distance to a chappel, which they entred, whence we heard an odd humming kind of noise, as if it came from the hollow of a cave: Curiosity also made us go in after them, where we saw a number of women, as mad as they had been sacrificing to Bacchus, and each of them an amulet, the ensign of Bacchus, in her hand. More than that we could not get to see; for they no sooner perceived us, that they set up such a shout, that the roof of the temple shook agen, and withal endeavored to lay hands on us; but we scamper’d and made what haste we could to the inn.

Nor had we sooner stuff’d our selves with the supper Gito had got for us, when a more than ordinary bounce at the door, put us into another fright; and when we, pale as death, ask’d who was there, ’twas answered, “Open the door and you’ll see.” While we were yet talking, the bolt drop’d off, and the door flew open, on which, a woman with her head muffl’d came in upon us, but the same who a little before had stood by the country-man in the market: “And what,” said she, “do you think to put a trick upon me? I am Quartilla’s maid, whose sacred recess you so lately disturb’d: she is at the inn-gate, and desires to speak with ye: not that she either taxes your inadvertency, or has a mind to so resent it, but rather wonders, what gods brought such civil gentlemen into her quarters.”

We were silent as yet, and gave her the hearing, but inclin’d to neither part of what she had said, when in came Quartilla her self, attended with a young girl, and sitting down by me, fell a weeping: nor here also did we offer a word, but stood expecting what those tears at command meant. At last when the showre had emptied it self, she disdainfully turn’d up her hood, and clinching her fingers together, till the joints were ready to crack, “What impudence,” said she, “is this? or where learnt ye those shamms, and that sleight of hand ye have so lately been beholding to? By my faith, young-men, I am sorry for ye; for no one beheld what was unlawful for him to see, and went off unpunisht: and verily our part of the town has so many deities, you’ll sooner find a god than a man in’t: And that you may not think I came hither to be revenged on ye, I am more concern’d for your youth, than the injury ye have done me: for unawares, as I yet think, ye have committed an unexpiable abomination.”

Among the Romans the symbol of satisfied and contented love was the myrtle branch, offered in sacrifice, along with milk and honey, to the obscene deity Priapus.

As a fetish, an apotropaic periapt, protective against all kinds of mishaps, the Romans made use of an amulet in the form of a fascinum. It was fashioned of various materials, often in the shape of a phallic symbol in high relief, on a plaque or medallion. The object was hung round children’s necks, on garden walls, on doors, or chariots, and on public buildings.

The Roman historian Julian Capitolinus, in his biography of the Emperor Pertinax, mentions glass vessels, phallic-shaped, that were used by the Romans for drinking. These vessels were known as phallovitroboli.

The ithyphallic concept as the source of creation was so deeply ingrained in the Roman consciousness, that they attached the ithyphallic device on all manner of objects: stones, seals, rings, medals, and lamps. As an extension of this concept, the Romans engraved on their drinking vessels phallic designs, as well as lewd scenes that would create in the drinker violent erotic provocations.

Sextus Pompeius Festus was a Roman lexicographer of the second century A.D., who describes a shrine in Rome dedicated to the obscene deities Mutunus and Tutunus. In this religious cult the suppliants were women. With head veiled, they came to offer sacrifice to the phallic powers.

The lewd rites of the phallic god Bacchus were celebrated by the Romans in a sacred wood near the River Tiber. Originally open to women only, the ceremonies were later on extended to men also, particularly to young men not over twenty years of age. At the nocturnal rituals there was clashing of cymbals, beating of drums. After an interval of excessive wine drinking, there ensued wild scenes of sexual promiscuity and perversions unlimited. Those initiates who seemed to have any scruples were sacrificed, and their bodies were thrown into the depths of a cavern. Men and women went frantic, shrieking their exultation to the deity, performing abandoned dance sequences. Sinister plots and furtive machinations also formed part of the aftermath of these tenebrous rites, malefic in their intentions, often fatal in their effects.

In addition to Priapus as the supreme generative deity, the Romans were dedicated to a number of other divinities endowed with analogous properties. Venus herself was worshipped at Rome in four temples.

A late Latin poem, entitled Pervigilium Veneris, The Vigil of Venus, the date and authorship of which are unknown, is dedicated to Venus and her spring festival. The poem itself is full of vernal descriptions. The theme is a paean to erotic passion. Its amatory refrain, the sense of which pervades the entire poem, runs:

Cras amet qui numquam amavit,

Quique amavit cras amet.

He who has never loved will love tomorrow.

And he who has loved will love tomorrow.

A still older deity was Flora, associated with the blossoming of plants and hence with cosmic generation. At her festival, held during the month of April, lewd farces were performed, all implicitly generative and genesiac in intent.

One of the most mysterious and libidinous cults in Rome was that of the Bona Dea, the Good Goddess, to which women only had access. An annual ceremonial was held in her honor, when a sow was sacrificed to her.

Juvenal, the satiric poet, describes the excesses of the initiates. Frenzied with intoxication, overwhelmed with deafening and clamorous music, these women practiced the most salacious dances. In their lubricity they were athirst for erotic conflict, and were even willing, adds the poet, to submit to bestial caresses.

Among the Roman deities associated with marriage rites and connubial consummations were: Stimula, who aroused the male erotic urges: Strenia, who furnished vigor: Virginiensis, who detached the bride’s zona or girdle: Volupia, who excited voluptuous sensations: Iugatinus, who united the marital partners. Also Domiducus, who conducted the bride to her new home: Munturnae, who presided over her settlement in her new position: and, more intimately involved in the physiological performance, Liber and Libera, Pertunda, Prema, and Subigus.

The Romans represented the male and female genitalia in the shapes of their wheaten-flour loaves. The epigrammatist Martial, in Book 9, 2, alludes to this priapic custom:

Illa siligineis pinguescit adultera cunnis.

The Roman poet Ovid (32 B.C.–17 A.D.) presents the ancient witch Medea in action. She invokes aid in concocting a potion to refurbish old age and induce youthful vigor:

Ye spells and arts that the wise men use; and thou, O Earth, who dost provide the wise men with thy potent herbs; ye breezes and winds, ye mountains and streams and pools; all ye gods of the groves, all ye gods of the night; be with me now. With your help I stir up the calm seas by my spell; I break the jaws of serpents with my incantations. I bid ghosts to come forth from their tombs. Now I have need of juices by whose aid old age may be renewed and may turn back to the bloom of youth and regain its earthly years.

The Roman elegiac poet Tibullus (c. 48 B.C.–19 B.C.) addresses Delia, the girl who scorned him. He has employed magic means to regain her love:

Thrice I with Sulphur purified you round,

And thrice the Rite, with Songs th’Enchantress bound:

The Cake, by me thrice sprinkled, put to flight

The death-denouncing Phantoms of the Night,

And I next have, in linen Garb array’d,

In silent Night, nine Times to Trivia pray’d.

In one of the Eclogues of the Roman poet Nemesianus, who flourished in the third century A.D., there is a dialogue between two shepherds who discuss their amatory affairs and love spells:

Mopsus: What does it benefit me that the mother of rustic Amyntas has purified me thrice with fillets, thrice with a sacred bough, thrice with the vapour of frankincense, burning the crackling laurels with live sulphur, and pours the ashes out into the stream with averted face, when thus wretched I am every way inflamed for Meroë?

Lycidas: These same things the many-colored threads have done for me, and Mycale has carried round me a thousand unknown herbs. She has chanted the charm, by which the moon swells, by which the snake is burst, the rocks run and standing corn removes, and a tree is plucked up. Lo! My handsome Iollas is nevertheless more, is more to me.

Horace, the Roman poet (65 B.C.–8 B.C.) depicts, in his Satires, a scene in which a love philtre is prepared.

As thus the boy in wild distress

Bewail’d, of bulla stripp’d and dress,

So fair, that ruthless breasts of Thrace

Had melted to behold his face,

Canidia, with dishevell’d hair

And short crisp vipers coiling there,

Beside a fire of Colchos stands,

And her attendant hag commands

To feed the flames with fig-trees torn

From dead men’s sepulchres forlorn,

With dismal cypress, eggs rubb’d o’er

With filthy toads’ unvenom’d gore,

With screech-owl’s plumes, and herbs of bane,

From far Iolchos fetch’d and Spain,

And fleshless bones by beldam witch

Snatch’d from the jaws of famish’d bitch.

And Sagana, the while, with gown

Tucked to the knees, stalks up and down,

Sprinkling in room and hall and stair

Her magic hell-drops, with her hair

Bristling on end, like furious boar,

Or some sea-urchins wash’d on shore;

Whilst Veia, by remorse unstay’d,

Groans at her toil, as she with spade

That flags not digs a pit, wherein

The boy imbedded to his chin,

With nothing seen save head and throat,

Like those who in the water float,

Shall dainties see before him set,

A maddening appetite to whet,

Then snatch’d away before his eyes,

Till famish’d in despair he dies;

That when his glazing eyeballs should

Have closed on the untasted food,

His sapless marrow and dry spleen

May drug a philtre-draught obscene.

Nor were these all the hideous crew,

But Ariminian Folia, too,

Who with unsatiate lewdness swells,

And drags by her Thessalian spells

The moon and stars down from the sky,

Ease-loving Naples’ vows, was by;

And every hamlet round about

Declares she was, beyond a doubt.

Now forth the fierce Canidia sprang,

And still she gnawed with rotten fang

Her long sharp unpared thumb-nail. What

Then said she? Yea, what said she not?

“O Night and Dian, who with true

And friendly eyes my purpose view,

And guardian silence keep, whilst I

My secret orgies safely ply,

Assist me now, now on my foes

With all your wrath celestial close!

Whilst, stretch’d in soothing sleep, amid

Their forests grim the beasts lie hid,

May all Suburra’s mongrels bark

At yon old wretch, who through the dark

Doth to his lewd encounters crawl,

And on him draw the jeers of all!

He’s with an ointment smear’d, that is

My masterpiece. But what is this?

Why, why should poisons brew’d by me

Less potent than Medea’s be,

By which, for love betray’d, beguiled,

On mighty Creon’s haughty child

She wreaked her vengeance sure and swift,

And vanish’d, when the robe, her gift,

In deadliest venom steep’d and dyed,

Swept off in flames the new-made bride?

No herb there is, nor root in spot

However wild, that I have not;

Yet every common harlot’s bed

Seems with some rare Nepenthe spread,

For there he lives in swinish drowse,

Of me oblivious, and his vows!

He is, aha! protected well

By some more skilful witch’s spell!

But, Varus, thou (doom’d soon to know

The rack of many a pain and woe!)

By potions never used before

Shalt to my feet be brought once more.

And ’tis no Marsian charm shall be

The spell that brings thee back to me!

A draught I’ll brew more strong, more sure,

Thy wandering appetite to cure;

And sooner ’neath the sea the sky

Shall sink, and earth upon them lie,

Than thou not burn with fierce desire

For me, like pitch in sooty fire!”

On this the boy by gentle tones

No more essay’d to move the crones,

But wildly forth with frenzied tongue

These curses Thyestean flung.

“Your sorceries, and spells, and charms

To man may compass deadly harms,

But heaven’s great law of Wrong and Right

Will never bend before their might.

My curse shall haunt you, and my hate

No victim’s blood shall expiate.

But when at your behests I die,

Like the Fury of the Night will I

From Hades come, a phantom sprite—

Such is the Manes’ awful might.”

The Roman poet Vergil (70 B.C.–19 B.C.) depicts, in one of his pastoral Eclogues, a love episode that involves magic rites for the purpose of winning the love of Daphnis:

Scarce had night’s cold shade parted from the sky, just at the time that the dew on the tender grass is sweetest to the cattle, when leaning on his smooth olive wand Damon thus began:

Rise, Lucifer, and usher in the sky, the genial sky, while I, deluded by a bridegroom’s unworthy passion for my Nisa, make my complaint, and turning myself to the gods, little as their witness has stood me in stead, address them nevertheless, a dying man, at this very last hour. Take up with me, my pipe, the song of Maenalus.

Maenalus it is whose forests are ever tuneful, and his pines ever vocal; he is ever listening to the loves of shepherds, and to Pan, the first who would not have the reeds left unemployed. Take up with me, my pipe, the song of Maenalus.

Mopsus has Nisa given him; what may not we lovers expect to see? Matches will be made by this between griffins and horses, and in the age to come hounds will accompany timid does to their draught. Mopsus, cut fresh brands for to-night; it is to you they are bringing home a wife. Fling about nuts as a bridegroom should; it is for you that Hesperus is leaving his rest on Oeta. Take up with me, my pipe, the song of Maenalus.

O worthy mate of a worthy lord! There as you look down on all the world, and are disgusted at my pipe and my goats, and my shaggy brow, and this beard that I let grow, and do not believe that any god cares aught for the things of men. Take up with me, my pipe, the song of Maenalus.

It was in our enclosure I saw you gathering apples with the dew on them. I myself showed you the way, in company with my mother—my twelfth year had just bidden me enter on it. I could just reach from the ground to the boughs that snapped so easily. What a sight! what ruin to me! what a fatal frenzy swept me away! Take up with me, my pipe, the song of Maenalus.

Now know I what love is; it is among savage rocks that he is produced by Tmarus or Rhodope, or the Garamantes at earth’s end; no child of lineage or blood like ours. Take up with me, my pipe, the song of Maenalus.

Love, the cruel one, taught the mother to embrue her hands in her children’s blood; hard too was thy heart, mother. Was the mother’s heart harder, or the boy god’s malice more wanton? Wanton was the boy god’s malice; hard too thy heart, mother. Take up with me, my pipe, the song of Maenalus.

Aye, now let the wolf even run away from the sheep; let golden apples grow out of the tough heart of oak; let narcissus blossom on the alder; let the tamarisk’s bark sweat rich drops of amber; rivalry let there be between swans and screech-owls; let Tityrus become Orpheus—Orpheus in the woodland, Arion among the dolphins. Take up with me, my pipe, the song of Maenalus.

Nay, let all be changed to the deep sea. Farewell, ye woods! Headlong from the airy mountain’s watchtower I will plunge into the waves; let this come to her as the last gift of the dying. Cease, my pipe, cease at length the song of Maenalus.

Thus far Damon; for the reply of Alphesiboeus, do ye recite it, Pierian maids; it is not for all of us to have command of all.

Bring out water and bind the altars here with a soft woolen fillet, and burn twigs full of sap and male frankincense, that I may try the effect of magic rites in turning my husband’s mind from its soberness; there is nothing but charms wanting here. Bring me home from the town, my charms, bring me my Daphnis.

Charms have power even to draw the moon down from heaven; by charms Circe transformed the companions of Ulysses; the cold snake as he lies in the fields is burst asunder by chanting charms. Bring me home from the town, my charms, bring me my Daphnis.

These three threads distinct with three colours I wind round the first, and thrice draw the image round the altar thus; heaven delights in an uneven number. Twine in three knots, Amaryllis, the three colours; twine them, Amaryllis, do, and say, ‘I am twining the bonds of Love.’ Bring me home from the town, my charms, bring me my Daphnis.

Just as this clay is hardened, and this wax melted, by one and the same fire, so may my love act doubly on Daphnis. Crumble the salt cake, and kindle the crackling bay leaves with bitumen. Daphnis, the wretch, is setting me on fire; I am setting this bay on fire about Daphnis. Bring me home from the town, my charms, bring me my Daphnis.

May such be Daphnis’ passion, like a heifer’s, when, weary of looking for her mate through groves and tall forests, she throws herself down by a stream of water on the green sedge, all undone, and forgets to rise and make way for the fargone night—may such be his enthralling passion, nor let me have a mind to relieve it. Bring me home from the town, my charms, bring me my Daphnis.

These cast-off relics that faithless one left me days ago, precious pledges for himself, them I now entrust to thee, Earth, burying them even on the threshold; they are bound as pledges to give me back Daphnis. Bring me home from the town, my charms, bring me my Daphnis.

These plants and these poisons culled from Pontus I had from Moeris’ own hand. They grow in plenty at Pontus. By the strength of these often I have seen Moeris turn to a wolf and plunge into the forest, often call up spirits from the bottom of the tomb, and remove standing crops from one field to another. Bring me home from the town, my charms, bring me my Daphnis.

Carry the embers out of doors, Amaryllis, and fling them into the running stream over your head, and do not look behind you. This shall be my device against Daphnis. As for gods or charms, he cares for none of them. Bring me home from the town, my charms, bring me my Daphnis.

Look, look! the flickering flame has caught the altar of its own accord, shot up from the embers, before I have had time to take them up, all of themselves. Good luck, I trust! Can I trust myself? Or is it that lovers make their own dreams? Stop, he is coming from town; stop now, charms, my Daphnis!

A renewal of vigor by magic means is described in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The scene involves the witch Medea, her lover Jason, and Jason’s aged father, Aeson:

Unaccompanied, she stepped uncertainly through the still silence of midnight. Deep slumber had relaxed men and birds and wild beasts. Without a sound, the hedges, the motionless branches lay still. The dewy air was still. Lonely, the stars glimmered. Thrice extending her arms, she turned toward them. Thrice, taking some water, she copiously bedewed her locks. Thrice she uttered howls from her lips. Then, on bent knee, touching the hard ground, she said:

“O night, most propitious for mysteries, and you, golden stars, that, along with the moon, follow the fiery day, and you, triple Hecate, who, aware of our undertaking come forth to help in incantation and magic art, and you, Earth, who teach magicians the potency of herbs, and you, zephyrs and winds and hills and streams and lakes, and all you gods of the groves, be my aid. By your aid, when I so willed, the streams returned to their springs to the astonishment of the river banks, and by your aid I stay the upturned waters and upheave the stagnant straits by spells, and I drive away the clouds and bring them back, and banish and summon the winds and break the jaws of snakes with my words and spells, and move natural rocks and trees uprooted from the ground and forests and I bid the mountains tremble and the ground rumble, and the spirits of the dead arise from the tomb. You also, O Moon, I draw down, and Helios’ chariot too pales at my incantation. The Dawn grows pale with my poisons. All of you have quenched the flames of the oxen for me and pressed their necks, reluctant for the task, under the crooked plough. You brought wars upon the serpent-born warriors and sleep upon the grim guardian.

Now there is need of juices whereby old age revived may bloom once more, and regain its former years. And you deities will grant this request—for not in vain is the chariot at hand, drawn by winged dragons.”

There was the chariot, sent from high heaven. No sooner had she mounted and soothed the frenzied necks of the dragons and shaken the reins lightly with her hands than she was whisked off aloft, and beheld the herbs growing on Mount Ossa and lofty Pelion and Othrys and Pindus and Olympus greater than Pindus. She plucked out suitable herbs by the root, and some she cut away with the curved blade of a bronze sickle. The herbs that grew thick on the banks of the Apidanus caught her fancy too and those on the banks of the Amphrysus. Nor were you overlooked, Enipeus: and the Peneus and the waters of the Spercheus contributed their quota, and the reedy banks of the Boebeis. Medea gathered too the sturdy grasses in Euboean Anthedon. And now when the ninth day had seen her traversing all the fields in her winged-dragon chariot, she returned.

As she advanced, she halted at the threshold and the gate, and stood under the sky. And she shunned contacts with men: and set up two altars of turf, on the right of Hecate, on the left of Youth. After she had wreathed them with vervain and wild foliage, close by she made a sanctuary by means of two ditches, and pierced the throat of a black ram with the sacrificial knife, and soaked the wide ditches in the blood.

Then she poured over it a beaker of flowing wine and a bronze beaker of warm milk and at the same time murmured words over it, and called upon the divinities of the earth, and begged the King of the Lower Regions and his stolen wife not to hasten to rob the limbs of the aged soul.

When she had propitiated them with prayer and many a chant, she bade that the exhausted body of Aeson be carried out of doors, and on the strewn herbs she extended the lifeless shape, relaxed by incantation in deep slumber. She bade Aeson’s son stand clear away, and the attendants too, and she admonished them to withdraw their profane sight from the mysteries. So bidden, they scattered in different directions. With disheveled hair, like a Bacchante, Medea encircled the blazing altars. She dipped finely split torches in the dark pool of gore, and lighted the bloody brands on the two altars. Thrice she encircled the aged body with fire, thrice with water, thrice with sulphur.

Meanwhile the potent drug boiled in the bronze kettle and leapt and whitened in the swelling froth. She threw in roots cut in Thessalian valley and seeds and blossoms and pungent spices. She added pebbles secured from the remote East and sands washed by the refluent Ocean stream. She added too the frost caught in the full moon and the baleful wings of a screech-owl together with the flesh itself, and the entrails of a werewolf wont to change its animal form into a man. Nor was there lacking the scaly skin of a water-serpent, the liver of a living stag. In addition, she threw in the head of a crow nine centuries old. By these and a thousand other unspeakable means she planned to delay the destined function of Tartarus. With a dry twig of long softened olive she stirred all the ingredients together, turning them over from top to bottom.

Behold now the old twig stirring in the boiling kettle first turned green, and presently put forth leaves, and suddenly became loaded with heavy olives. But wherever the fire belched out foam from the hollow kettle and the drops fell hot on the ground, the soil grew fresh, and flowers and soft grass sprang up.

As soon as she beheld this sight, with drawn sword Medea pierced the aged man’s throat and, allowing the old blood to exude, filled the spot with juices. After Aeson had drunk them, either with his lips or through his wound, his beard and hair, shedding their greyness, quickly assumed a dark color. The emaciation vanished, and the pallor and decay disappeared, and the hollow wrinkles were filled up in the fresh body, and the limbs grew rapidly.

Aeson stood amazed, recalling that this was how he was forty years back.

Petronius, who belongs in the first century A.D., produced a remarkable novel entitled The Satyricon, in which he describes an instance of renewed virility by means of witchcraft:

“This is the custom, Sir,” said she, “and chiefly of this City, where the women are skill’d in Magick-charms, enough to make the Moon confess their power, therefore the recovery of any useful Instrument of Love becomes their care; ’tis only writing some soft tender things to my Lady, and you make her happy in a kind return. For ’tis confest, since her Disappointment, she has not been her self.”

I readily consented, and calling for Paper, thus addrest myself:

“’Tis confest, Madam, I have often sinned, for I’m not only a Man, but a very young one, yet never left the Field so dishonorably before. You have at your Feet a confessing Criminal, that deserves whatever you inflict: I have cut a Throat, betray’d my Country, committed Sacrilege; if a punishment for any of these will serve, I am ready to receive sentence. If you fancy my death, I wait you with my Sword; but if a beating will content you, I fly naked to your Arms. Only remember, that ’twas not the Workman, but his Instruments that fail’d: I was ready to engage, but wanted Arms. Who rob’d me of them I know not; perhaps my eager mind outrun my body; or while with an unhappy haste I aim’d at all; I was cheated with Abortive joys. I only know I don’t know what I’ve done: You bid me fear a Palsie, as if the Disease cou’d do greater that has already rob’d me of that, by which I shou’d have purchas’d you. All I have to say for my self, is this, that I will certainly pay with interest the Arrears of Love, if you allow me time to repair my misfortune.”

Having sent back Chrysis with this Answer, to encourage my jaded Body, after the Bath and Strengthening Oyles, had a little rais’d me, I apply’d my self to strong meats, such as strong Broths and Eggs, using Wine very moderately; upon which to settle my self, I took a little Walk, and returning to my Chamber, slept that night without Gito; so great was my care to acquit my self honourably with my Mistress, that I was afraid he might have tempted my constancy, by tickling my Side.

The next day rising without prejudice, either to my body or spirits, I went, tho’ I fear’d the place was ominous, to the same Walk, and expected Chrysis to conduct me to her Mistress; I had not been long there, e’re she came to me, and with her a little Old Woman. After she had saluted me, “What, my nice Sir Courtly,” said she, “does your Stomach begin to come to you?”

At what time, the Old Woman, drawing from her bosome, a wreath of many colours, bound my Neck; and having mixt spittle and dust, she dipt her finger in’t, and markt my Fore-head, whether I wou’d or not.

In Rome the inns—the tabernae, the popinae, and the ganea—were virtually, in addition to their primary purpose in serving drink, houses of prostitution and assignation.

In wedding celebrations among the Romans, ribald and licentious songs played no mean part. These songs were known as Fescennini Versus, and were believed to have apotropaic significance, while they also recalled the primary purpose of the nuptial union.

At harvest festivals similar lewd verses were exchanged between masked performers.

As visual guides to the lupanaria in ancient Rome, there were lighted lamps, of phallic shape, near the doors. Seneca the philosopher refers to this custom. Also the poet Juvenal in the sixth satire:

fumoque lucernae

Foeda lupanaris

An old commentator adds: Prostabant autem meretrices ad lucernas.

Acca Larentia was a Roman goddess whose festival—the Larentalia or Larentinalia—fell on December 23. The tradition was that she herself had been a prostitute. Her festival was a fertility ritual, as in the case of Lupa and Flora.

There was a tradition that the Emperor Heliogabalus sponsored a brothel in Rome called Senatulus Mulierum: The Little Senate of Women.

Nonariae were public prostitutes in Rome who were not allowed to appear before the ninth hour. The satirist Persius refers to this custom:

Si Cynico barbam petulans Nonaria vellat.

The ancients believed that the feminine lips had some relation to the genitalia: and likewise that a prominent nose indicated a corresponding membrum virile. There is evidence of this view in a short epigram by the Roman poet Martial:

Mentula tam magna est quantus tibi, Papyle,

nasus, ut possis, quotiens arrigis, olfacere.

Ovid